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Today's Northumbrian Church Project visit was St Andrew's Bolam; which is magicfully atmospheric.

It includes a Saxon tower, mostly Norman-style otherwise (round arches), with some rebuilding (pointed arches) done in the 1200s, and some more later.

The church is located in a gorgeous and ...

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paperbackebookgoodreads

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an ensemble cast of lovable losers

facing their own sense of powerlessness

during a countrywide blackout

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a :NotAmazon: exclusive ...

A good indication that this is a fallen world is the existence of insects that feed on human and animal blood. I would speculate that when God created the various forms of life it was a law that each group maintained itself by feeding on lower forms. Thus, plants absorb nutrients from the soil in which they grow, ...

I have previously made an analogy between our situation in this mortal life in relation to Heaven, and that of a student at Medical School training to be a doctor.

Mortal Life = Medical School; Heaven = Being a doctor.

I have found this analogy helpful in trying to articulate the difference to this mortal life ...

The strongest evidence against the proposition that "Alma introduced baptism to the Nephites" is to be found in 2 Nephi 31. This post will deal with that chapter and attempt to reconcile it with that theory.

This chapter is part of an extended discourse by Nephi, beginning in Chapter 25, where he explains that he is ...

A while back, Kristor of the Orthosphere wrote a post in which he surprisingly toyed with and then acknowledged the reality of uncreated freedom.

The acknowledgement made quite an impression on me at the time, but I resisted responding to the post for the simple reason that my interactions with Kristor or his ideas ...

A post by Francis Berger brought into focus a common propaganda tactic to which I must invent a term "abstracting isolation".

The basic idea is that some-Thing harmful being introduced, some new and bad policy, or some strategic plan of evil... is explained-away...

Is talked into neutrality or insignificance - and ...

This nonsense dredged up from the past is Wade's fault.

In a June 7 comment on "The closest calendrical approximations of pi," he wrote:

What's more, we recently discussed the significance of "P" (as in black-eyed p).

Now, pi (rhymes with "pie") in classical Greek, is customarily pronounced pi (rhymes with ...

Many Christians cannot seem to wrap their heads around the harmful and destructive – to say nothing of utterly useless – Boromir Strategy, as outlined by Dr. Charlton via Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

The following is but an example of this tired old snare in which Christians continue to get ...

As a spiritual goal and method, seeking spiritual contacts with individual people* is the best strategy - and superior to the use of abstract models.

The difference is that the division of reality into persons (into "beings") is the primary division of reality - reality actually is divided into beings; whereas any ...

Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am, who shares both my March 15 birthday and my given names of William James, came up in the comments on "The Byrds and Byrd, Marcellus and Marsellus" (June 3). Bill Wright wrote:

Interesting. He goes by the stage name Will.i.am, which turns William into a form of the sacred name: Will ...

This morning I spotted someone wearing this T-shirt:

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This caught my attention because I had just posted about a homophone of pie in "The closest calendrical approximations of pi" (June 6).

At first I thought of pie as a diminutive ending as in cutie-pie (which used to be written as QT 3.14 on ...

It's hard to believe now, but I was a contributor to Wikipedia in its early years. I created these articles:Anne StrieberCTR ringGadianton robbersGazelemJ. J. DeweyList of code names in the Doctrine and CovenantsMaster MahanRobert Matthews (religious figure)Ted R. Kurts (a.k.a. Ted Jesus Christ God, sadly no longer ...

I recently featured an unconventional pieta by Franz von Stuck and drew parallels between its depiction of Christ in the tomb and Hans Holbein's rendition of the lifeless Jesus.

Today, I focused a little on another von Stuck painting, Lucifer, a simple work depicting a man-demon with glowing eyes sitting pensively ...

This afternoon I was teaching the construction "It is [adjective] for [noun] to [verb]." After giving several examples, I asked one of my students to make a sentence. He thought for a second and said, "It is impossible for people to fly."

In the evening, I finish reading Powerless. When I closed the document and went ...

March 14: This is the usual Pi Day. It encodes 3.14, which is approximately 99.9493% of pi.

July 22: This encodes 22/7, or approximately 3.1429, which is about 100.0403% of pi., a slightly closer approximation than 3.14.

November 10: This is the 314th day of a common year and the 315th day of a leap year. Thus on ...

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From the movie Akenfield (1977) - a horse-drawn reaper binder - in action, from a distance; surely one of the most poetic of Mankind's machines (although very hard work for the horses).

I am re-reading Ronald Blythe's Akenfield again, this time as an audiobook, and am again finding it a deeply ...

This morning I was reading Powerless over a cup of coffee at a breakfast shop. A television screen across the room was playing the news with the sound off, but I was reading and didn't pay any attention to it.

I read this:

It's just a story I'm working on, What's it about, It's about... uh... an invisible war, What ...

once i publish the new novel i am putting together a new essay collection with the most recent musings for the many people who only like to read me about boring stuff like metaphysics. because a writer who publishes is always a bit like a prostitute.

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when people pester me about something theology related i'm going ...

Imagine someone who, as a child, suffered under an abusive, alcoholic father.

Telling that person that he cannot apply his individual experience to all fathers or fatherhood in general may be logically coherent, but it essentially sidesteps the individual's terrible childhood growing up under a bad father.

One bad ...

The question of "History" - that there is an objectively-true, evidenced account of the past: of how things came to be the way they are now - is one that has been very strong since the subject of History began to emerge as a distinctive discipline, detached (supposedly!) from religious (later ideological) ...

The scale of modern-day evil is extraordinary but many people are insensitive to this evil because, being spiritually based, it is not obvious to the materialistically minded. The majority simply look away as long as they personally are not suffering. But that is becoming less easy to do as one of the manifestations ...

I was reading a biography of Stevie Smith by Frances Spalding, and a chapter concerning her relationship to Christianity - by which was largely meant the Church of England.

At one point it quoted a passage to the effect that the one thing SS found most repellent was the idea of Hell. In particular, to summarize, ...

I have just finished reading Stevie Smith's "The Novel on Yellow Paper" - which ended badly in a narrative sense - but also because she kept inserting chunks of untranslated German.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading Owen Barfield's "Saving the Appearances" and he peppered the text with bits of untranslated Latin, ...

My last post, "Many a Melchizedek," about a sync involving the word many, quoted some Byrds lyrics. This morning I was reading Laeth's latest, Powerless, and found this (ellipsis in the original):

Maybe it’s because we have similar tastes in music… and there aren’t that many Byrd or Purcell fans out there

The ...

Regular readers may recall that I have soft spot for pieta paintings.

​In fact, I have featured a few on these pages over the years, including some that "don't work," (for me at least).

With that in mind, I recently stumbled across a rather unconventional pieta that does work, albeit without the traditional ...

Yesterday morning (June 1), I woke up with the phrase "many a Melchizedek" in my mind, though with no memory of any dream that may have put it there. It comes from my 2021 post "Lives, the universes, and everything" (coincidentally posted on my 42nd birthday), in which I imagine God saying this to Moses:

The first ...

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Someone who is on the side of God the Creator, and who desires to attain the salvation of Jesus Christ, must Proceed With Caution when it comes to joining any formal organization.

This is because we inhabit a totalitarian system; meaning that all formal institutions in our society are connected ...

Romanticism is A Fact of modern Man; such a powerful factor in the makeup of modern Man, that those who exclude or ignore the romantic in their ideology (whether that be Christian or Secular Right, or anything else) consign themselves to feeble motivation, feeble courage; and the inevitability of their own corruption ...