Khari > Recent Status Updates

Well, I never noticed that verse in John 17 before.

That certainly brings a whole new understanding to me.

I'm probably arguing more that culture itself is formed through themes, genres, and patterns of perception.

Well, arguing is a bit strong, I'm researching to see if there is empirical evidence of themes, genres, and patterns of speech affecting culture.

Oh goodness, I am learning that my own research is far more based on the ideas of Foucault and Bourdieu than I thought they were. I really need to read them.
..."a distinct theoretical movement that focuses on the ways in which popular culture is part of the formation of political consciousness through themes, genres and patterns of perception."

I'm not arguing the political consciousness part though.

"A critical/Marxist view on comics which considers comics as a means of indoctrinating children with the ruling ideologies of society."

Blink.

Comics are satisfying because the have a coming together which is the opposite of the primary separation of mother from child.

Wha???

What gobbledygook is that? And why is it treated so seriously???

I think this copy of the book is missing some stuff, there have been two paragraphs so far, in different places in the book that the beginning doesn't match the end, like a different paragraph got spliced in the middle and the whole thing doesn't make any sense.

A lot of this book is expressing linguistic facts in pure snark, and I love it.

Every now and again, though, he comes out with something that's just so pretty, so true, and has zero snark.

"It is safe to say that no language lacks ways of conveying degrees of confidence in truth, given that all humans have the cognitive equipment for perceiving such gradation and urgently need to express it day in and day out."

I knew it. I knew it was going to be based on critical discourse analysis. Sigh.

Sigh. Every time I see 'poststructuralism' I get the shivers and remember Judith Baxter...

"A speculation about how something in a language 'must' reflect something essential in its speakers is incomplete without considering the distribution of that something in languages worldwide."

That isn't the case. Behavior can be better or worse, but people are just that, people. And we are all basically the same. We have the same motivations, the same intuitions, the same abilities, there is a lot more universality among people than we like to think.

"A writer I shall not name praises a Third World people on the acknowledgements page of a book for, among other things, being witty and 'irreverent'...But why wouldn't they be witty and irreverent? Which homo sapiens aren't? The passage is deeply condescending."

He's right, it is. While I would argue that some cultures are superior to other cultures, I would never argue that people are superior to other people.

"We must put our wills into this matter of being comforted, just as we have to put our wills into all other matters in our spiritual life. We must choose to be comforted."

And this is why I don't just throw books out the window when they say crazy things, because then, sometimes they say things that are good.

Like this.

"It is pure and simple unbelief that is at the bottom of all our lack of comfort, and absolutely nothing else. God comforts us on every side, but we simply do not believe His words of comfort."

....That seems pretty true to me.

So, the main issue I can see with this book is that she takes her case way too far.

On this page she claims "that stern judge is not there. He does not exist."

Goes a tad too far. God is a judge, he is even a stern judge, he declares himself as such in his word, in his new testament even. So where does she get off claiming that aspect doesn't exist? Willful cherry picking.

I have my opinion, I'm just pointing out that she's not making sense.

...girl is contradicting herself.

Earlier she said that the name I am is unfinished, which allows us to add to it whatever we feel the need of, and yet here it says We have all sorts of thoughts of God, and conjecture this and imagine that but we are wasting our energies because we can only know God through what Christ says about him.

So...are we supposed to add stuff? Or are we not supposed to?

Oh. And there we have it, the spiciness of this volume and why my friend, who got to choose it out of a set of 10, said it might be interesting to read.

Yep, it is. We just got to the reason why...she basically just said that the old testament revelation is imperfect and partial.

Huh. I wonder if she makes that argument about prophecy? Without Daniel, can you interpret Revelation?

So, she is not making this point, it's just something that I started thinking of in contrast to what she is saying.

Christ is 100% God, but God isn't 100% Christ, or at least, not Christ incarnate, Christ had limitations that God didn't or doesn't have. Right? Like, he could die and get hungry. I don't think God does. What about temptation? Can God not get tempted?

*Ultimately, almost all books settle into the public consciousness in shortand.*

That's true.

I probably contribute to that with my summaries that are incredibly illustrative of how I subjectively understood or reacted to the book...

Ha.

Just got theoretical backing for an activity I do in my English classes. Apparently reconstruction tasks of texts is a good measure of comprehension as well as logical/sequential reasoning.

Take that any imaginary person who didn't like my activity. :D

So, I knew that human memory is built around narrative structure, but this is the first time I've learned where we learned that from.

apparently a bunch of studies by Mandler, Deforest, Johnson, and Nezworski, conducted in the 70s and 80s.