Not really a "blog", strictly speaking; more of an on-line notebook. A sort of commonplace book , where I can collect short excerpts, and related links, from books that I am reading (and the occasional on-line article). This is mostly for my benefit; things that I want to remember. Sounds dull? Yeah, maybe, but no one is twisting your arm, and besides, there's some good stuff down there...after all, there are certainly worse ways for you to waste fifteen or twenty minutes on the internet.

15.1.11

The Shallows; What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains - Nicholas Carr

- Buy this book.

- About the Author (Wikipedia)
 
- Authors Blog

- Article by Author: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (Atlantic)

- Wikipedia Page for "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

- Article: "Scientific Study Indicates That Internet Addiction May Cause Brain Damage" (Time)


"The reading of a sequence of printed pages was valuable not just for the knowledge readers acquired from the author's words but from the way those words set off intellectual vibrations within their own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.
    Even the earliest silent readers recognized the striking change in their consciousness that took place as they immersed themselves in the pages of a book. The medieval bishop Isaac of Syria described how, whenever he read to himself, "as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, when with prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart." Reading a book was a meditative act, but it didn't involve a clearing of the mind. It involved a filling, or replenishing, of the mind.  Readers disengaged their attention from the outward flow of passing stimuli in order to engage it more deeply with an inward flow of words, ideas, and emotions. That was - and is - the essence of the unique mental process of deep reading. It was the technology of the book that made this "strange anomaly" in our psychological history possible. The brain of the book reader was more than a literate brain. It was a literary brain."    (64-5)

13.1.11

The Haunted Bookshop -Christopher Morley

- Buy this book.


- About the Author (Wikipedia).


- The Haunted Bookshop Wiki page.


- Complete text of book online.

The Roads to Modernity; The British,French, and American Enlightenments -Gertrude Himmelfarb

- Buy this book.


- About the Author.


- Review (The New Criterion)


- Review: Peter Berkowitz in Policy Review


- Review (Claremont Review of Books)



   "The separation of church and state, however interpreted, did not signify the separation of church and society. On the contrary, religion was all the more rooted in society because it was not prescribed or established by the government. This is why, Tocqueville explained, religion and liberty coexisted and reinforced each other.  And this is the meaning of one of his most profound paradoxes: "Religion, which among Americans, never mixes directly in the government of society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions; for if it does not give them the taste for freedom, it singularly facilitates the use of it." Religion was "the first of their political institutions" because it was the prerequisite of both freedom and morality - thus of republican government itself.

12.1.11

True Grit - Charles Portis

- Buy this book.

- About the Author (Wikipedia)

- True Grit Page on Wikipedia


- Video: Fr. Barron's review of the Coen Bros movie.

- Movie review (National Catholic Register)


Of Judge Parker, Mattie declares that:

“His manner was grave.  On his deathbed he asked for a priest and became a Catholic.  That was his wife’s religion.  It was his own business and none of mine.  If you had sentenced one hundred and sixty men to death and seen around eighty of them swing, then maybe at the last minute you would feel the need of some stronger medicine than the Methodists could make.  It is something to think about.”

The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored -George Weigel

- Buy this book.


-About the Author (wikipedia)


- George Weigel article archive at National Review Online..







"I was once seated at a table with Weigel before I knew anything about him. He was probably the most pompous, boorish and shallow conversationalist I've ever encountered. He just assumes that he can make up stuff and nobody will challenge him because he's such an 'expert.' A most irritating evening" - Comment Box post on a very anti-Weigel article in the National Catholic Reporter.


    "To believe in this God, the father of Jesus Christ, is to believe that order and reason, rather than chaos and indifference, are at the root of things. To know this Father, through Jesus Christ, means to know "that love is present in the world, and that this love is more powerful than any kind of evil."
   We "cannot live without love," Pope John Paul writes. We cannot understand ourselves, we cannot make sense of life, unless love comes to us and we "participate intimately" in it. We sense our profound need for love instinctively. The God whom Jesus reveals is the guarantor that this intuition is one of the great truths of the human condition, not a psychological illusion."   (8)