Following links from old posts I had linked in my last post, "A white hart and a portal to a parallel world," led me to these two quotes (from this post and this video, respectively), each attributed to someone who comments here:

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This afternoon, I read this in Wendy Berg's Red Tree, White Tree, just one page after a statement that the race of Faerie "now exists in parallel with, but mostly invisible to, the human race."

The appearance of a white hart, or a black dog, or a raven, will often indicate the opening of the ways between the human ...

​I posit that human freedom must be uncreated to be authentic.

Uncreated signifies not divine in origin, meaning it does not emanate from God. Since God is not the source of freedom, he cannot create freedom “into” us or any other Being in Creation.

Declaring freedom to be a timeless and ...

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I am suspending commenting for a week or so, following a period of (what felt to me!) relatively high productivity of output. This suspending is a thing I often do at about this time of year, around early summer.

I do this in order to "Build Soil" - to continue inputs and thinking, and allow ...

Eternal is a difficult, ambiguous word.

In the past, I used it to describe Beings, which I assume have no beginning and no end.

Unfortunately, this led some to believe that such Beings must also exist entirely outside time. Or that they never change.

However, I regard time as a necessary aspect of Beings and cannot ...

Although I do not agree with everything Berdyaev assumes, I admire him for understanding that freedom could only be truly free if it were placed outside of God, which he accomplished by arguing for the existence of the Ungrund, a reworking of Böhme’s primordial abyss that Berdyaev defines as pure meonic ...

​The matter of freedom is important to me because it is through freedom that we discern the nature of God.

It is through freedom that we apprehend God either as a loving father or as an absolute, autocratic ruler or a completed, static entity.

What we assume about freedom determines what we assume about God. ...

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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, ...