Ontological differences in divine and human properties#

Introducing the book#

Church Growth#

Career and Family#

Bono Knows How to Waste Money:#

According to Advertising Age, His RED campaign has spent $100 million on marketing to raise money for buying and distributing medicine in Africa. Total amount raised: $18 million.

Story of Sergey Brin#

A Mormon in the White House?#

"If it becomes permissible to question the tenets of Romney's faith, all religious people will be vulnerable," Dean argued. "All religions require a faith in the fantastic and a belief in the unbelievable. If Romney's faith in the Book of Mormon is used as evidence that he is a fool, a new kind of political attack will be legitimized. Christians who believe in the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the literal truths of Communion will be dismissed out of hand."

"It almost goes without saying that certain secularists already hold such views. But if members of other religious communities support the attacks on Romney's faith because of some animus towards Mormonism, the weapon they legitimize will in short order be turned against them." (p. 10)

On Prophets#

Best comment (wrt Brigham Young on race):

What will it be, 100 years from now that Presidency Hinckley should have known?

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, by Harold Bloom#

Harold Bloom is amazing. A few choice quotes from his Wikipedia page:#

A new poet becomes inspired to write because he has read and admired the poetry of previous poets; but this admiration turns into resentment when the new poet discovers that these poets whom he idolized have already said everything he wishes to say.

Bloom believes that the goals of reading must be solitary aesthetic pleasure and self-insight rather than the "forces of resentments'" goal: improvement of one's society, which he casts as an absurd aim, writing "The idea that you benefit the insulted and injured by reading someone of their own origins rather than reading Shakespeare is one of the oddest illusions ever promoted by or in our schools." His position, stated simply, is that politics have no place in literary criticism: a feminist or Marxist reading of Hamlet, for example, would tell us something about feminism and Marxism but nothing about Hamlet itself, it being so universal.

This book attempts to explain what the genius behind many great authors. It is a very subtle and the answer (and method of getting there!) is never quite the same. In fact, in many places the book is incomprehensible. But amazing.#

Why these one hundred? At one point I planned many more, but one hundred came to seem sufficient. Aside from those who could not be omitted---Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Homer, Vergil, Plato, and their peers---my choice is wholly arbitrary and idiosyncratic. These are certainly not "the top one hundred," in anyone's judgment, my own included. I wanted to write about these. [p. ix]

On the School of Resentment:#

The study of mediocrity, whatever its origins, breeds mediocrity. [...] We do accept tables and chairs whose legs fall off, no matter who carpentered them, but we urge the young to study mediocre writings, with no legs to sustain them. [p. ix]

I was a sweeter person before our universities yield to supposed social benignity and chose texts for teaching largely on the basis of the racial origin, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnic affiliations of the New Authors, past and present, whether or not they could write their way out of a paper bag. [p. 50]

Marxist academic cheerleaders waving their pom-poms, reduce George Eliot as uselessly as the reduce Shakespeare, with whom she shares many qualities, including a mastery of dramatic dialogue. [p. 627]

Shakespeare:#

To contemplate Shakespeare's genius is at once to encounter the critic's despair and the critic's ecstasy. [p. 18]

If Bloom could ask Shakespeare a question:

[Did] it comfort you to have fashioned women and men more real than living men and women? [p. 18]

On the same idea:

The invasion of our reality by Shakespeare's prime personages is evidence for the vitality of literary characters, when created by genius. We all know the empty sensation we experience when we read popular fiction and find that there are only names upon the page, but no persons. In time, however overpraised, such fictions become period pieces, and finally rub down into rubbish. [p. 4]

Burgess wrote a play where Cervantes and Shakespeare argue over who is greater. Cervantes responds:#

It is not and it will never be. God is a comedian. God does not suffer the tragic consequences of a flawed essence. Tragedy is all too human. Comedy is divine. [p. 38]

Montaigne on being too old to get venereal diseases:#

I hate that accidental repentance that old age brings. I shall never be grateful to impotence for any good it may do me... Miserable sort of remedy, to owe our health to disease! [p. 41]

On Plato:#

PLatonists are dangerous men and women, to themselves and to other. Plato's Laws makes me uneasier than Deuteronomy does, or the Koran at its fiercest. Great moralities too swiftly turn savage, and I like it less and less, after a half-century at Yale University, that like all the other academic institutions of the English-speaking world, its laws turn more and more into a parody of Platonism. [p. 123]

In comparing Harry Potter and Shakespeare, Bloom quotes Johnson:#

The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth. [p. 168]

Kierkegaard on the faithful husband:#

He solves the great riddle of living in eternity and yet hearing the hall clock strike, and hearing it in such a way that the stroke of the hour does not shorten but prolongs his eternity. [p. 200]

Kafka:#

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heave simply means: the impossibility of crows. [p. 208]

Flaubert:#

The priest rose to take the crucifix; then she stretched forward her neck like one suffering from thirst, and glueing her lips to the body of the Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he recited the Misereatur and the Indulgentiam, dipped his right thumb in the oil, and began to give extreme unction. First, upon the eyes, that had so coveted all worldly goods; then upon the nostrils, that had been so greedy of the warm breeze and the scents of love; then upon the mouth, that had spoken lies, moaned in pride and cried out in lust; then upon the hands that had taken delight in the texture of sensibility; and finally upon the soles of the feet, so swift when she had hastened to satisfy her desires, and that would now walk no more. [p. 658-659]

Borges:#

I have never recovered from the initial wound I received when first reading Borges's fictions some forty years ago, but it seems always to be the same wound. Borges would not regard that as his limitation, but Shakespeare wounds us a thousand different ways. [p. 682]

Quotes#

"The Devil owes everything to Milton." [p. 50, Shelley]

A Christian epic in twelve books and many thousands of lines devotes six words, broken by an enjambment, to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ! [p. 52, on Milton's Paradise Lost]

At seventy-one, I am perhaps not yet ready for the Paradiso (where, being of the Jewish persuasion, I am not going to end anyway), [p. 98, on Dante, of course]

No other book seems so oddly and arbitrarily arranged as [the Koran], which may be appropriate because the voice that speaks the Koran is God's alone, and who would dare to shape his utterances? [p. 145]

Psychoanalysis is itself the illness of which it purports to be the cure. [p. 179, Karl Kraus]

Austen however is Shakespeare's daughter: her heroines defy historicizing contingecies, and are among our rarest images of inward freedom. [p. 284]

[The universal condition of marriage: when silence and conversation fuse.] [p. 329, on Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts]

[Emerson is a sweet as barbed wire.] [p. 337, quoting Angelo Bartlett Giamatti]

Never has a poet, and storyteller, benefited so greatly by translation. [p. 387, on Poe]

In short, Swinburne is usually very annoying, and we don't need a genius to annoy us. [p. 427]

The hallmark of the greatest art is that imitations of it are legitimate, worthwhile, tolerable; that it is not demolished or devoured by them, or they by it. [p. 493, quoting Paul Valery]

Confronted with all that is vulgar and inept in the present time, can we not take refuge in cigarettes and adultery? [p. 656, quoting Flaubert]

I had no children, I haven't transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature. [p. 679, quoting Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis]

Bad writing is bad for children, and the Harry Potter books (Even if I am a minority of one on this) are cliche-heavy period pieces, and will end in dustbins. [p. 742, on how Lewis Carroll was good children's literature]

James Sr. was a Swedenborgian only as so many people I knew in my youth were Freudian; you had dinner with them, or went to a movie together, and they carried along a volume or two by the founder of psychoanalysis. [p. 749, on Henry James]