An excerpt from "Carrie," a short story by Joshua Gibbs
God created all things in six days. Some Christians allege that Christ created all things anew in three, and the last two thousand years has seen many other bold and valiant claims about the power of man. It might be said that Gutenberg reinvented humanity, or that Copernicus reinvented the heavenly bodies, or that Edison and Ford reinvented society, but in Galton Sanger alone can man claim to have reinvented every last thing.
Mexico is extremely rich in its poverty and I see that in food. When you have "nothing to eat," you have to eat anything and everything. A few years ago, I went to Oaxaca with Alejandro Ruiz. We wanted to visit the coastal part of Oaxaca. And we The first stop was in Cuquila. So it's a coffee farm. There's this guy named Roberto. He was making a sauce. You know, molcajete. And I was starving because it was a long trip. Directly, I went to the kitchen to grab something to eat and I saw Roberto. He was making the sauce and I ate it.
"Menus," by Blaise Cendrars
I.
Truffled green turtle liver
Lobster Mexican
Florida pheasant
Iguana with Caribbean sauce
Gumbo and palmetto
II.
Red River salmon
Canadian bear ham
Roast beef from the meadows of Minnesota
Smoked eel
San Francisco tomatoes
Pale ale and California wine
III.
Winnipeg salmon
Scottish leg of lamb
Royal Canadian apples
Old French wines
I woke this morning and in the early dawn light filtering through the windows, Michelangelo's David stood over my wife's side of the bed. The figure was exactly David, the outline of the head and the curve of the shoulders. After a moment, I realized I was seeing not an enigma, but a pareidolia, the same phenomenon of the mind which finds faces in clouds.
Make every effort... to be holy…”
- Hebrews 12:14
Just before my children depart for their classrooms in the morning, I ask them, “Why do you go to school?”
They answer, “To learn how to be an excellent human being.”
Some years ago, David Bentley Hart wrote that “love of country is most ennobling… when it is most concrete,” which is to say that loving America in general will not foster genuine national loyalty, however, loving baseball and apple pie— particular things, in other words— will do so. Hart went on to enumerate more than fifty particularly American things he loved, and his list ranged from the Marx Brothers to Samuel Barber and Miles Davis.
The Joshua Gibbs Christian Worldview Exam
1. If you took the “Dharma Initiative Christian Worldview Exam” online, answered forty multiple choice questions about piety and religion and history and art and wine, and received a score back indicating your worldview was only 17% Christian, you would…
A. Become quite anxious and wonder if you were attending a truly Biblical church; schedule a meeting with your elders; compose a list of questions to ask your elders which might help you determine if you have properly understood their teachings.
A chasm separates "worldview" and what is commonly meant by "worldview analysis." I have no issue with a class wherein different worldviews are taught, insofar as “worldview” refers to a series of related presuppositions. I am more than content that worldviews exist (like gravity, the number four, and dogs exist). On occasion, I refer to "worldviews" while teaching and I have seen various benefits which come from students reading books about competing worldviews.
When I take students to the Met and the Cloisters in New York, I try to avoid asking interesting questions. I do not initiate deep conversations. At the end of a long day of enjoying Rembrandt and Vermeer, I do not ask students to offer up reflections on what they have seen. I do not take students to New York to teach them anything. We go to New York to be enriched.
No writer in the Western Tradition has conceived a more terrifying vision of Heaven than Dante, for Dante believed a man actually had to want to go to Heaven in order to get there. Granted, Dante’s God will ultimately requite even the smallest fraction of desire for the Divine, but some desire must actually be present in the soul of a man by the moment he dies. If not, the man gets what he wants, and what he wants is Hell. “Broad is the path which leads to destruction,” teaches Christ, a claim which Dante would likely take to mean, “Most people prefer Hell.” C.S.
