bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 10:13 am
"the virgin birth at the opening & the empty tomb at the close... bear witness that this life... is marked off from all the rest"
"[the church] is not created, formed & introduced by individual men on their own initiative, authority & insight"
"in face of such a church [man initiated] we... must appeal to the free grace of God to be made blessed outside of it"
"a church of that description is not the Church but the work of sin, of apostasy in the Church"
"with God all things are possible, and with us at least very many" barthian humor?
"the revelation of God in its subjective reality [is] the existence of men who have been led by God himself to a certain conviction"
"the work of the Holy Spirit is that our blind eyes are opened &... in thankful self-surrender we recognize & acknowledge it: Amen"
Barth is either impossibly narrow or impossibly broad. can't yet figure it out. no worries, still have 8000p left. all in good time.
maybe that's where wisdom lies. in the tension between impossibly narrow & impossibly broad. or the harmony thereof. Paul, anyone?
"when we ask how a man comes to hear the Word of God, to believe in Christ... at once we must turn and point to the inconceivable..."
"the Word creates the fact that we hear the Word. Jesus Christ creates the fact that we believe in Jesus Christ"
"true preaching from the Holy Spirit will not consist in pointing to our own or other men's seizure, but to the divine seizing"
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 12:10 pm
"what in the OT (the expectation) was God's covenant with man, is here in the NT (the fulfillment) God's becoming man"
"To the protest of the Synagogue we can and must reply unreservedly that God's becoming man is the goal of the Old Testament"
"...there ceases to exist in the NT the manifold and multiform office of men of God, the instruments of the covenant"
"the whole problem of the OT is compressed into the twofold question as to why it goes so ill with this people, & why it is so evil"
"it is only because Jesus lives that His cross is the sign under which His Church marches"
"against the whole unending burden... stand the words: it is finished"
"in the most artless possible way all the NT Easter narratives fail to supply... an account of the resurrection itself"
"not a line of the real NT can be properly understood unless it is read as ... the witness to hope"
"Christ is always He who stands at the door and knocks, & faith is always the decision in which a man opens to Him that He may enter"
"as Christians and theologians we do not reject the description of Mary as the 'mother of God'..."
"Mariology is an excrescence, i.e., a diseased construct of theological thought. Excrescences must be excised"
salman khan
In an undistinguished ranch house off the main freeway of Silicon Valley, in a converted walk-in closet filled with a few hundred dollars' worth of video equipment and bookshelves and his toddler's red Elmo underfoot, is the epicenter of the educational earthquake that has captivated Gates and others. It is here that Salman Khan produces online lessons on math, science, and a range of other subjects that have made him a web sensation.
via CNN.
Like so many entrepreneurial epiphanies, Khan's came by accident. Born and raised in New Orleans -- the son of immigrants from India and what's now Bangladesh -- Khan was long an academic star. With his MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master's in electrical engineering and computer science. He also was the president of his MIT class and did volunteer teaching in nearby Brookline for talented children, as well as developed software to teach children with ADHD. What he doesn't know he picks up from endless reading and cogitation: His gift, like that of many teachers, is being able to reduce the complex. "Part of the beauty of what he does is his consistency," says Gates. Of Khan's capacity to teach, Gates, who says he spends considerable time trying to help his three kids learn the basics of math and science, tells Fortune, "I kind of envy him."
Micah & I are thoroughly enjoying Sal's pedagogy. He makes the basics crystal clear. In any field, gaining a deeply intuitive feel for the fundamentals is everything - the complexities are only impossibly or confusingly complex when the fundamentals aren't really understood. And teaching the basics well is very difficult - I myself haven't the patience or ability. And so, I'm incredibly grateful for Sal.
Micah says: this is simply not fair - he's making school-stuff exciting and fun!
we told you so...
For the people of India, it came as no surprise that Osama Bin Laden was found and killed just a couple hours from Pakistan's capital, Islamabad."Well, in a nutshell the reaction has really been we told you so," says Sadanand Dhume, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and columnist for the Wall Street Journal's Asia edition.
Since 1947, India and Pakistan have faced off in war three times, and in the last decade tensions have escalated since terrorist attacks in India were linked to militants with Pakistani ties.
For many, finding bin Laden in the military town of Abbattabod only "reinforced the long-held Indian view Pakistan is complicit in global terrorism," Dhume tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.
via NPR.
calm violence
He put away the rage, though. He locked it up. He decided that he would be a more effective tool of punishment if he did not speak the rage inside him, did not attempt to describe it, to verbalize the rage itself. Bin Laden never ranted or raved as other men of great violence do. The speeches of Adolf Hitler are always a touching point. Hitler would whip himself into a frenzy as he spoke, driving himself into heights of outrage that spilled over and into the audience. The point was to unleash those demons of violence in himself and therefore let everyone listening know that they, too, could unleash those demons. Hitler wanted to sculpt a German public that was comfortable with the angry and dark passions of violence. He wanted them to feel that rage was appropriate and that the actions resulting from rage were the natural next step. Hitler never found it difficult to express his rage. He gloried in expressing it. He lived to express it. He became one of the acknowledged masters of expressing rage.
Osama bin Laden went the opposite route. His was the calm and deliberate side of violence.
via The Smart Set.
For comparison, here's a bit from Hitler at Nuremberg.
