Index of Articles

Facets of Fat

ARISTOTLE REPRIMANDED GREENHORN scientists in his Academy for their immature disgust toward the gross and unappealing in nature. “The consideration of the lower forms of life ought not to excite a childish repugnance. In all natural things there is something to move wonder" (Boorstin 51). He believed that all things looked at impartially are manifestations of the divine. Ralph Ralph Waldo Emerson Waldo Emerson extended Aristotle's estimate of the beauty of nature into the process of death itself: “There is no object so foul that intense light will not make it beautiful. Even the corpse has

Word Count:

3024

3145 min read
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Fear of the Lord

IF PERFECT LOVE casts out all fear, how can fear of the Lord be the beginning of knowledge, understanding and wisdom? My experience confirms the returns of love but adamantly denies fear's benefit.

While trapped in circumstances self-constructed or brought on by misfortune, the assurance of being loved has calmed and focused my guilty, anxious mind. Love experienced as an unexpected gift has turned meaningless tragedies into moments of contemplation, gratitude and even 

Word Count:

1106

1106 min read
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For All Time, For All People

OUR CUB TROOP gathered to "obey the law of the wolf cub pack to dibb dibb dibb and dobb dobb dobb!" Part of the ritual of dibbing and dobbing was to stand at stiff attention in front of the Union Jack (pre-1965 Canadian flag), making sure to continue breathing as we sang God Save the Queen and solemnly prayed Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer. In our ironed striped scarves and woolen jerseys, we bowed our heads and ritually intoned, "Our Father..." I could no more have explained what this prayer meant than I could tell you

Word Count:

1241

1164 min read
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Genre & Techniques in the House of Usher

Story of Consciousness - As in other of Poe's gothic tales, the delusiveness of the experience is rendered in and through the consciousness of the narrator, so that we participate in his Gothic horror while we are, at the same time, detached observers of it. In the image of the house as skull or death's head and the merging of the narrator's face with the face of the house, which is also Usher's face in the pool, we see once again in Poe the subtly ironic paralleling of narrative construction of the tale to its visual focal point and by

Word Count:

825

847 min read
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H. Richard Niebuhr: An Introduction

Richard Niebuhr was brought up in a German American family with deep roots in the intellectual world of Europe. He breathed in the American atmosphere of change, activity, progress and capitalism, all of which called for an activist response to social injustice.

Word Count:

900

922 min read
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Hearers and Doers of the Word

We have had a variety of experiences in relationship to the Bible that colour how we have come to approach it. Some recall positive experiences of hearing a grace-filled word, others recall negative experiences of being held to account by its . Whatever our past experiences, many of us have been surprised to discover, through various authors or our own reading, that the Bible contains a depth of meaning beyond what we expected. The Word was introduced as an 'incarnate and living word', 'like Christ' in that it actually exists yet points to something transcendent. It is meant to be

Word Count:

445

467 min read
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Hippies, Hindus, and Trancendentalists

The title I have chosen for a discussion of Emerson's essay, The Transcendentalist, comes from a similar title by Bob Larsen: Hippies, Hindus and Rock and Roll. In his book, Larsen tries to set up nefarious connections between the occultic and pagan world of deepest darkest Africa and India. His thesis is that because rock and roll has a connection to these cultures of paganism it participates in their demonic underpinnings. The reason I chose to parody his title is not only to get some secret revenge on Larsen, who is so obviously racist and simplistic, but also because

Word Count:

2130

2172 min read
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Honouring What Once Was

This morning I began reading Berhard Lohse's Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development. Lohse introduced me to an early version of Luther as a theology student studying a standard medieval curriculum. Peter Lombard's Sentences emphasized Augustine, whom Luther regarded highly, but did so in a very scholastic philosophical manner, with which Luther felt at odds. Luther's assignment as a young student was to write marginal notes on this benchmark text. On the margins of Lombard's book Luther railed against scholasticism, especially that which was influenced by Aristotle. He complained that philosophic theology was not true theology but mere

Word Count:

1342

1371 min read
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How did a Literary Classic Become a Horror Flick?

Beginning with the first dramatic version of Frankenstein on the London stage in the 1820's until Hollywood began churning out Frankenstein monster films (42 titles at last count), the general spirit of Mary Shelley's original has significantly shifted. What was once a literary classic about parental abandonment of human creations, or about the character distortions that arise when we deny a relationship to the feminine "Other", soon became a narrowly focused presentation of a mad scientist and a grotesque monster. The different mediums of the stage and screen of course had its effect. Playwrights and movie directors, in the hope

Word Count:

808

799 min read
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I Believe in Dialogue: A Response to I Don't Believe in Atheists

After the first hour of reading Chris Hedges' I Don't Believe in Atheists, my animus toward the and very popular "fundamentalist" atheists was sated. Like Chris, I have as much disdain for these pompous ignoramuses as I do for narrow religious fundamentalists. Any wrongheaded and stubborn opinion rooted in ignorance ought to repulse us.

Word Count:

608

624 min read
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