the little red book
Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book" is the closest thing to a bible that Marxist-Leninist, materialist and atheist Chinese society can have. By some estimates, five billion copies of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao were published during its heyday, the Cultural Revolution, that violent period of ideological fervour in the 1960s and 1970s. But questions have now been raised about whether the Great Helmsman actually wrote it himself, or got a ghost writer to do it for him.
The book of quotations from communist China's founding father Chairman Mao Tse-tung, was a must-have in the days when Red Guards roamed the streets looking for any signs of ideological wavering. It was also the revolutionary tome of choice for every western Marxist-Leninist hipster on university campuses. Pithy and strident aphorisms such as, "it is the duty of the cadres and the Party to serve the people. Without the people's interests constantly at heart, their work is useless," helped to establish a cult of personality around Mao Tse-tung so powerful that the current leadership of China is still trying to shake it off.
But lately there has been a flurry of online rumours that some of Mao's writings were not written by Mao himself, but by his secretary Hu Qiaomu...
via The Independent.
writing well
After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping. A. J. Liebling offers a complementary view, more concise and stripped of paradox, which runs: “The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.” Learning to write sound, interesting, sometimes elegant prose is the work of a lifetime. The only way I know to do it is to read a vast deal of the best writing available, prose and poetry, with keen attention, and find a way to make use of this reading in one’s own writing. The first step is to become a slow reader. No good writer is a fast reader, at least not of work with the standing of literature. Writers perforce read differently from everyone else. Most people ask three questions of what they read: (1) What is being said? (2) Does it interest me? (3) Is it well constructed? Writers also ask these questions, but two others along with them: (4) How did the author achieve the effects he has? And (5) What can I steal, properly camouflaged of course, from the best of what I am reading for my own writing? This can slow things down a good bit.
All sorts of people write books that promise shortcuts to writing well, most not particularly helpful, if only because shortcuts are not finally available. Over the years, I have consulted many of these books, on rare occasions taking away a helpful hint or two, but not much more. The most famous is Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, which is devoted to teaching the composition of prose clear, crisp, and clean of excess verbiage or tricky syntax, served up in what is called the active voice. Nothing wrong with clean, crisp, and clean prose, or with the active voice, but The Elements of Style is limited in its usefulness, if only because there are more ways of writing well than the ideal advocated by its authors. On the Strunk and White standard, for example, I suspect my opening sentence would have to be heavily edited, if not deleted.
The best book on the art of writing that I know is F. L. Lucas’s Style (1955). Lucas was a Cambridge don, a Greek scholar, and an excellent literary essayist, especially good on eighteenth-century writers, who wrote a once-famous book called The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal. Style is filled with fine things, but the most useful to me in my own writing has been Lucas’s assertion that one does best always to attempt to use strong words to begin and end sentences. Straightaway this means eliminating the words “It” and “There” to begin sentences and dropping also the pompous “Indeed.” This advice also reinstates and gives new life to the old schoolmarmish rule about not ending a sentence with a preposition, for a prepositon is almost never a strong word.
via The New Criterion.
church dogmatics I/1
Barth's outline:
The Doctrine of the Word of GodIntroduction
§ 1. The Task of Dogmatics § 2. The Task of Prolegomena to Dogmatics
Chapter I. The Word as the Criterion of Dogmatics
§3. Church Proclamation as the Material of Dogmatics §4. The Word of God in its Threefold Form §5. The Nature of the Word of God §6. The Knowability of the Word of God §7. The Word of God, Dogma & Dogmatics
Chapter II. The Revelation of God
Part I. The Triune God
§8. God in His Revelation §9. The Triunity of God §10. God the Father §11. God the Son §12. God the Holy Spirit
My bits of Barth:
April 29, 2011 [9]
April 30, 2011 [3]
May 1, 2011 [14]
May 2, 2011 [21]
May 3, 2011 [1]
May 4, 2011 [19]
May 5, 2011 [4]
May 6, 2011 [35]
bits of barth
"What has to happen in order that the proclamation of the church may be the Word of God...has already happened" http://goo.gl/XUjJU
"of God it is impossible to speak… if we speak of Him, we are no longer speaking of Him" http://goo.gl/8fYbW
"if [we] are dependent on prayer, undoubtedly [we] are also dependent on serious & honest work"
"Christian preaching is speaking about God in the name of Jesus Christ"
"is not the Church completely lost if the grace of the Word of God is not at all points mightier than the weakness of man?"
the danger of wanting the Word of God without God, bringing it under our power & understanding: http://t.co/Zm4w2pl
truth, beauty & heresy : t.co/1xejVdi
"as though man has to make the Word of God powerful by the weight of his own will..." t.co/hIBmVn2
"though their doctrine is imperiled by their errors, it does not exclude them from the one Church which is ours." t.co/VLTwLri
"the ghosts of the true Church of the past may lead the Church astray no less than the spirits of the present" t.co/2qpeEsG
"for it is an honour & a joy, an inner necessity & a gracious privilege to serve & therefore to teach the Word of God"
the word for the day
Barth, CD I/2, p.842:
... [we] exclude the possibility of a romantic dogmatics, a dogmatics which does not start honestly from the Church of the present day, but goes back more or less successfully to the past and critically or uncritically tries to think and speak from the standpoint of a past century of the Church. Now it is implied in what we have defined as its confessional attitude that dogmatics has to think and speak in constant contact with the history of the Church, in the unity of the Church of all time. But this does not mean that it must pretend to be a primitive Christian dogmatics or one belonging to the 4th or 16th or 17th century, though if it did, in many respects it would no doubt be more imposing, profound and pious, more rich in content, than if tried to be simply a modern dogmatics speaking in and to the Church of the present. If we think we can meet the needs of the contemporary generation by retiring to the secure ground of a better epoch of the past, and engaging in a process of excavating and rehabilitating, we may obtain the specious results which can always be obtained when ghosts are conjured. But we must add that the Church is not edified by magic of this kind, and that therefore dogmatics must divest itself of romantic as of every other form of magic. The ghosts even of the true Church of the past may lead the Church astray and into temptation no less than the spirits of the present.
How perfectly put!
locating barth
Barth, CD I/2, pp.829-832:
In this sense, and corresponding to our own direction into the Church, we have marked off the Evangelical Church as the Church of Jesus Christ from the three heresies: Neo-Protestantism, which at almost every point resembles the Evangelical Church in organization and administration but is essentially alien to it in spirit; Roman Catholicism; and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. But even when Neo-Protestantism is strictly excluded as foreign to it, as in this discussion, it is obvious that the Evangelical Church is not a unity. At least three great forms are to be distinguished in it. And to some extent they have distinguished themselves with the same definiteness as if it were a question of an opposition between the Church and one of the heretical sects. These are the Lutheran, the Reformed and the Anglican branches of the Evangelical Church. Let us admit at once that when we speak of the Evangelical Church and therefore of the Church generally in this presentation of dogmatics we mean the Evangelical Reformed Church, in conformity with our own Church position, and the fathers and the dogma to which we owe loyalty in obedience to the Word of God until we are led by that same Word to something better...Even within the Evangelical Church we have only the one choice, which is no choice. A false choice jeopardizes the whole character of dogmatics as Church dogmatics. We must take upon ourselves a necessary opposition to other types of Evangelical dogmatics. We cannot practice indifferently Anglican, Lutheran or Reformed dogmatics, but only Reformed dogmatics. By this we mean the dogmatics of the particular Church which was purified and reconstituted by the work of Calvin and the confession which sealed his testimony.
As Reformed thinkers, it is impossible for us to say of the Anglican and Lutheran Church, as we do of the Roman Catholic Church, that in them also there is a Church; we must say of them what in view of their doctrine may seem strange and difficult to approve, that in another form they are the one Church of Jesus Christ just as much as is the Reformed Church. The grounds of objection and division are not heresies but specific errors, specific theological notions, badly, misleadingly, erroneously and arbitrarily construed, of a type which may easily arise within the Reformed Confession itself without necessitating disruption...
What we feel is that, though their doctrine is imperiled by what we consider their errors, it does not exclude them from the one Church which is ours.
Well, then. All clear now?
ecclesiastical earnestness
Barth, CD I/2, p. 808:
...there exists in the Church, before heresy arises... the possibility that a false moralistic earnestness will dominate proclamation, as though it is man's affair whether it is victorious or defeated, as though man has to make the Word of God powerful by the weight of his own will, as though it lies in man's hands to compel decisions about it. When this is the case, the Church strengthens itself to serve the Word of God, as though it is a matter of the organization and running of a business, or the instituting and carrying through of a great law-suit, or the deployment and operations of an army... it is impossible to handle the truth this way. As a rule, this kind of ecclesiastical earnestness involves a trimmed and therefore a truncated version of the truth. It may not be guilty of actual heresy, but it presupposes a deviation which sooner or later will lead to heresy.