Khari > Recent Status Updates

I realize these essays were written quite a while ago.

But...I still wonder...why on earth anyone thought they were legitimate even then?

I mean, someone who is non-ironically quoting a source titled "The Archaic Revival: Speculation on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess and the End of History" as explanatory surely has a screw or two loose.

"Problem solving can be done uncritically, as when no one asks whether the problem we're spending time solving is the real problem at issue or in whose interests it is that the current problem be solved."

Boy is that ever true.

Gregory of Nyssa "But if one asks for the interpretation or description or explanation of the divine nature we shall not deny that in such a science as this we are unlearned...For there is no way of comprehending the indefinable as it is by a scheme of words. For the Divine is too noble and too lofty to be indicated by a name: and we have learned to honour by silence that which transcends reason and thought."

I think I already noted this, but it's so good I have to again:

Tersteegen "A comprehended God is no God"

"Chrysostom...is combating the arrogance and overweening presumptuousness of the human understanding and the creature in general in imagining that any escape is possible from the incomprehensible, supreme, transcendent, and 'wholly other' nature of God."

Well, I have discovered that he is much more comprehensible when he is explaining someone else's thoughts than his own. The appendix so far is about Chrysostom and I'm following it.

I really resonated with the following quote.
"We wonder at the greatness of the sea and its measureless expanse, but terror and fear only seize upon us when we gaze down into its depths."

Deliberate sequentiality is an insufficient explanation for the narrative effect of sequential graphic images in comics.

"In principle, a series of sketches by Pablo Picasso presented chronologically in a book could e called a deliberate sequence of images, conveying information about an artistic development over time. It is nevertheless very unlikely that many people would call such a book a comic."

"For a comic not to be a story it should be possible to create a global coherence on the basis of something other than story-structure and in which the local coherences are made on inferences based on parameters other than actions, actors time, and place..this is, if anything, only a theoretical possibility, as there will always be a narrative effect in a sequence of graphic images."

"The panel constitutes the smallest unit of time and place."

Go back to their original poster. Read the comments everyone else wrote.

Then have a reflection asking if they would choose the same quotes again if they had to do the assignment over and why. What new information or perspectives did they notice as they read the others. What of their own thoughts were confirmed by others. What did they notice about their own patterns of thinking? What kinds of arguments drawn too?

The quotes to affirm and challenge exercise sounds like a good one.

Students all read the same text, choose 1 quote they think is good and 1 that is bad. Come to class, put in groups of five, share quotes and reasons for them. Group has to pick one of each, from different people, make a poster, say why they all picked them. Go around and read other posters, comment on the reasons or write their own.

Huh. Now that is an interesting thought. He's comparing art to religion in that everyone has the capacity to enjoy, appreciate, and be a receptive audience to art, but it takes someone especially endowed to create art, to make it, to notice something artistic and capture it so that others can receive it.

He says the same is true for religion and I think that's a very interesting thought that i want to pursue more.

Oh thank God. The next writer is cogent.

"Image and text are not simply added to each other, but enter into a dynamic fusion that creates new meaning." She says this as a culmination of showing an example, explaining the example, then showing how the example supports this argument. It all made sense, was understandable, had no leaps in logic, had no words used in inexplicable ways...such a relief after the last one

What does this even mean? "The spectres of the repeated signs are an excess of meaning which naturally suggests reduction to achieve reality."

What is he talking about? What is natural about the suggestion? Where is the defense of the idea? What is the idea???

There is writing i don't get, take Otto who I'm also reading right now, and then there is writing that I think the author themselves didn't get.

It's so vague!! What does a constellation mean? Clearly he's not referring to stars, so what is he referring to? No idea, he doesn't define it. What is a spectre? Clearly not a ghost, but he doesn't define it, he just sticks in a Derrida reference as if this is both definition and justification. It's not.

This is one thing I don't understand about the epistomelogy of those who believe that knowledge is created: "[students decide how] a fictional character is deciding how to create knowledge in [a] discipline or trying to judge which knowledge can be related as valid and reliable."

If you are the one creating the knowledge, how can you also be the judge of its reliability and validity? It seems rather subjective.

pg. 46

"For [some theorists] schizophrenia or madness is a socially produced phenomenon representing the internal contradictions of capitalism as they play themselves out in personal relationships."

Uh...no.

Clearly this person has never talked to an actual schizophrenic.

Also, no, schizophrenia exists in non-capitalist nations.

"There can naturally be no defense of the worth and validity of such religious intuitions of pure feeling that will convince a person who is not prepared to take the religious consciousness itself for granted. Mere general argument, even moral demonstrations, are in this case useless...criticisms and confutations...are [also] unsound as...weapons...for the assailant always stands outside the arena."

The criterion of the value of a religion as religion cannot ultimately be found in what it has done for culture, nor in its relation to the 'limits of the reason' or the 'limits of humanity', nor in any of its external features. It can only be found in what is the innermost essence of religion, the idea of holiness as such."

Today i am astonished to learn that the Shrike series' plot point of Christ being the empathic part of the god head might not have been just his own creation.

Otto just said that God the Father is the utmost rational part of the God head, child Christ is the most non rational part.

I...have no idea WHY he says this. And I can't help but think, where is the Spirit in this dichotomy?

I feel like I'm getting stupider by reading this book...

Because of page numbers.

Heaven help us.

Apparently you can't have a sustained argument across pages of text.

I suppose I'm straw manning him a bit, but he hasn't bothered to give anything nuanced for me to steel man. He just asserts that page numbers are different so the characters are therefore different.

Just pure flabbergastion is all I am left with.