Cosmic Funnies
Origami Around
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
DEAR READER
Kaledo Art
we're not kids anymore.
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blake kathryn
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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One Nice Bug Per Day
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Today's Document
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❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Mike Driver
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Janaina Medeiros
JBB: An Artblog!
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@triadic
Happy un-un-birthday Lewis Carroll, born #onthisday in 1832. Pictured here: the frontispiece to The Rectory Umbrella, a magazine produced by Carroll and his 10 siblings, when he was around 17 years old. More in Jenny Woolf’s essay here: https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-mystery-of-lewis-carroll #otd
Joseph Mallord William Turner. Interior of an Italian Church, 1819 [source]
⭐️⭐️⭐️
"As long as we are thinking of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of the spirit.”
— C.S. Lewis, Membership
Gratitude heightens our expectations, and heightened expectations feed our aspiration and confidence.
Artificial lightning produced in a laboratory, n.d.
Jef Bourgeau (American, b.1950)
"Northern Lights at St. Pierre," 2024
An 18x18 inch archival pigment print of digital art on 24x24 inch coldpress watercolor paper
“But man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground
The AI Debate
Material reality operates according to physical laws that science can study. But persons exist simultaneously on several planes – body, soul, and spirit united in a person.
Consciousness cannot be achieved through algorithms – not because our computers aren’t powerful enough, but because self-awareness belongs to a non-material plane of reality. No amount of computational complexity can bridge the gap between syntax and meaning.
Materialism fails everywhere it’s applied to persons. You cannot reduce love to oxytocin, beauty to preference patterns, moral obligation to evolutionary advantage, or human dignity to biological function. Persons are embodied souls, created for communion with a personal God, bearing His image.
We should use AI where it excels – as a tool for analyzing data, automating routine tasks, and solving computational problems. But we must resist letting it invade domains that belong to persons: education that forms character, counseling that heals souls, relationships that constitute our humanity.
-Excerpted from an essay by Robert J. Kurland.
We attempt to define a person, the most commonplace person we know, but he will not submit to bounds; some unexpected beauty of nature breaks out; we find he is not what we thought, and begin to suspect that every person exceeds our power of measurement.
Charlotte Mason
But though the words originally refer to that freedom from the Jewish law which the gospel confers on the church of God, yet the reason of the inference holds good in the case of any other real and valuable liberty which men have a right to: So that this observation is plainly deducible from the text; vis. that it is the duty of all men to stand fast in such valuable liberty, as providence has conferred upon them.
A Sermon Preached to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston | Teaching American History Simeon Howard, 1773, on Galatians 5:1
(via Alexander Graham Bell’s Tetrahedral Kites (1903–9) — The Public Domain Review)
But things fall apart, and when malice joins with folly, they can fall apart very fast.
(1) Anthony Esolen on X: "Rest in Peace, Jane Greer, poet, devout Christian, strong family woman, erstwhile editor of the Plains Poetry Journal. Let me tell a story on myself. When Jane was running the Journal, she graciously published several of my poems, and I really needed the boost at that time." / X
“I have found that to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision as far as possible to annihilate the power of reason.”
— Frederick Douglas, Narrative Of the Life Of Frederick Douglas
A key element to Allen’s approach is one that is also found in Alain Besançon’s book, The Falsification of the Good, which identifies the nature of modernity as a counterfeiting evil rather than a negating evil. Modern culture doesn’t attempt to destroy the good in society but replace it with a false good in the hopes that most people will not know the difference. Who hasn’t had the experience of buying a product and discovering that the shiny exterior hid a reality of shoddy workmanship? Do we all not see the way that television and mass media news serve as inferior replacements for community and real citizen participation in government? Are we not consumed by phony, astroturfed political “causes” that distract us from the greater injustice of a regime which has fully and completely turned away from God? Rather than strike directly against justice, love, and truth, the strategy of the modern world has been to falsify those concepts. By calling hate love and love hate, the parody of secular morality confuses and distracts Christians who ought to be standing in clear opposition to evil works.
Away from Secular Semantics - American Reformer
I believe it was Elizabeth Anscombe who had the best response to the patronizing claim that nothing is ever “black and white.” She pointed out that two things manifestly are: black, and white.
The Passion of Jordan Peterson - by Bethel McGrew
How 2024 Continues to Be the Worst Timeline
The time is coming, as Someone once said, when the Master of the House will come. You know not the day or the hour and therefore it is better not to mess around because the bright light of his truth will make all of your little prevarications look unbelievably stupid.
Prayerful attention is hard because it requires quieting the mind; it is important because our attention determines how the world shows up for us. Our attention is a limited resource, so the question of what to attend to is really the question of what to value. Ultimately, attention is a form of love. Dreher invokes Augustine’s dictum: What we love, we will become.
Ready for Weirdness by Matthew B. Crawford | First Things
