The Early Church Fathers, Sunday, May 22, 2011,Justin Martyr

We call this food Eucharist, and no one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true and who has been washed in the washing which is for the remission of sins and for regeneration [i.e., has received baptism] and is thereby living as Christ enjoined. For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these, but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus (First Apology 66 [A.D. 151]).

Wacky Wednesday, Wednesday, June 22, 2011, The Munsters: Everyday Living

It's Wednesday, we've made it half way through the week, it's time to kick back and enjoy a laugh with The Munsters.

Founders Friday, Friday, May 20, 2011, Samuel Adams

Image via Wikipedia

"If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin." 
 

Miscellaneous Musings, Thursday, May 19, 2011

An interesting article in the UK’s Guardian.  I, sorry to say, must be counted among those who see very little true intellectual promise among those commonly regarded as the intelligentsia.  Still, there is always the tendency to look back wistfully on “the good old days.” However justified the tendency may be.

The fact that a nation that lives by its considerable wits should be in denial about its reliance on the life of the mind is truly weird. It's what led the historian of ideas Stefan Collini to postulate what he calls the "absence thesis". This has two dimensions – temporal and geographical. In the first, contemporary figures are regarded as just pale reflections of the great figures of the past: thus Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, say, are pygmies compared with George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Richard Posner, another student of public intellectuals, describes this as measuring today's average against yesterday's peak. In either case, it conveniently ignores the fact that the heroes of the past were often undervalued by their contemporaries as mere pale reflections of the "really" great figures of an even more distant past. The geographical dimension of the absence thesis is reflected in the belief that intellectuals begin at Calais. But, as Collini observes, "the frequently encountered claim that there are no intellectuals in Britain is generally advanced by those who, were they living in certain other societies, would unhesitatingly be regarded as intellectuals".

Wacky Wednesday, Wednesday, May 18, 2011, Arte Johnson

It's Wednesday, we've made it half-way through the day, it's time to kick back and enjoy a laugh from Laugh-In

Miscellaneous Musings, Tuesday, May 17, 2011

I ran across this New Yorker story and thought it interesting. It’s about a researcher at Baylor, David Eagleman and an experience of time he had as a boy. I’ve shared a similar experience just one time in my life, in Viet Nam. In a time of danger, not great, I distinctly remember feeling that I was moving in slow motion. I had the additional feeling of watching myself, as if in a movie. It was quite strange. Anyway, the story, here, is worth reading.

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.


Yet “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?


The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds? Time is a dimension like any other, fixed and defined down to its tiniest increments: millennia to microseconds, aeons to quartz oscillations. Yet the data rarely matches our reality. The rapid eye movements in the mirror, known as saccades, aren’t the only things that get edited out. The jittery camera shake of everyday vision is similarly smoothed over, and our memories are often radically revised. What else are we missing? When Eagleman was a boy, his favorite joke had a turtle walking into a sheriff’s office. “I’ve just been attacked by three snails!” he shouts. “Tell me what happened,” the sheriff replies. The turtle shakes his head: “I don’t know, it all happened so fast.”

Enjoy.

The Early Church Fathers, Sunday, May 15, 2011, Ignatius of Antioch

Image via Wikipedia

Take note of those who hold heterodox opinions on the grace of Jesus Christ which has come to us, and see how contrary their opinions are to the mind of God. . . . They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, flesh which suffered for our sins and which that Father, in his goodness, raised up again. They who deny the gift of God are perishing in their disputes.

(Letter to the Smyrnaeans 6:2-7:1 [A.D. 110]).