Halloween

I feel like I ought to post something on Halloween, seeing as how it is October 31 and all. I know many blogs are posting on Reformation Day, and that is certainly valuable. You can see an excellent blog entry from Dr. George Grant here on the subject. However, a few years ago I ran across an article written by James Jordan on Halloween. I enjoyed it, but have never really taken the time to check out the argument. Nevertheless, I submit it for perusal by any who care to confirm or refute it.You can find a copy of it here.
More recently I have found a similar interpretation of Halloween by Doug Wilson. I also enjoyed it and think it has a lot of very pastoral and informative suggestions, which is why it was written in the first place. His take on "Satan's holiday" can be found here.
We dressed the kids up for a couple of outings this year, nothing scary (per Wilson's remarks) and let them get candy and such. We even carved a Jack O' Lantern for our church Fall festival. We have relaxed our approach to the evils and dangers of Halloween a little this year. It reminds me of something I once heard Dr. Grant say, and have heard repeated by many since. Every new Calvinist should be locked up for five years and then allowed to speak. In the time since I first came to the Reformed faith, I have loosened the net on what Scripture requires and what Christian liberty allows. I hope and pray that I have done so in the light of the Gospel and with the sanctifying grace of the Spirit.

Step Two

Well, my thesis has been accepted by my adviser. That means that I now send it to the other two members of my committee and they tell me what they think about it. My adviser made lots of comments and suggestions, as the other members will, I'm sure. Once I get all their feedback, I'll make changes and then defend the corrected version of my thesis. This will all need to happen before Thanksgiving. If all goes well, I will graduate with an M.A. in History.
I am very excited about this, and very appreciative of my adviser. He really went out of his way to help me when I came to him saying I needed to graduate this semester. The other members of my committee are all men I respect as well, so I am sure their comments are going to be valuable.
I'll keep the blog posted as to what happens and how it happens.

The Good School

"The good school does not just offer what the student or the parent or the state desires, but it says something about what these three ought to desire. A school is fundamentaly a normative, not a utilitarian, institution, governed by the wise, not by the many."
David V. Hicks, Norms and Nobility, 13.

Radical Thoughts

A friend of mine showed this to me recently. It is an excellent look at our problem from a non-American source.

Every homeschooler and private school should see this.
Enjoy.

If you have ever wanted to go to jail, but weren't sure how...

This is a great way to go to jail for a speeding ticket.

Attempting to follow politics

With my attention on my M.A. so far, I have been unable to really follow politics like I'd like. I did get to watch the third presidential debate and I have seen the skits SNL has been putting on (though I missed Palin on Saturday night) thanks to YouTube.
I have kept up with Doug Wilson's thoughts on Governor Palin over at his Blog and Mablog site. Very interesting stuff. Andrew Kern's insights at CiRCE are also excellent. I honestly don't know who to vote for. I am not stimulated by either of our two presidential candidates. I also do not buy the "throiwng your vote away" philosophy. In the absence of a write-in candidate I may follow Chesterton's advice and vote for the worse of the evils out there just so we can really see how bad it is.
Gar DeMar's website had a article on not losing sight of where the real action is this election season: the House of Representatives. I'm still pondering all this in my mind and looking at the options. I doubt I'll give any secrets away here even once the election is past.
I always enjoy watching election returns come in. November 4 is right around the corner.

Eliot on Tradition

From T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

Guess what???

Guess what this is...










It is the first completed draft of my thesis. I still don't have a title for it, but I guess I don't have to for my first draft. It ended up about 109 pages long, with the bibliography.
Now it is time to do the editing process. I have two friends looking into the grammar, which I know will be awful. My wife and I have agonized over the arrangement, and probably are not done with that yet. I am still not satisfied with my introduction.
Nonetheless, the first draft is complete.
Oh, yeah, it has to be turned in Wednesday.