GREAT opening analogy man! And I love the title. Could be a good book title. I started Confessions a few months ago, and I have felt the same way about it. Timeless insights. God bless my brother, looking forward to the unnamed future project!
This recalls a Dave Rubin chat with Dennis Prager and his time at Columbia U. Prager said that he has had one epiphany in life, which is that “fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,” and he realized there was no wisdom at Columbia University during his grad school days all the way back in the 1970s.
Also speaking of medicine gone bad, I am at seven weeks post triple bypass and I have just finished reading a book called The Clot Thickens by GP and medical detective and statin skeptic, Scotsman Malcolm Kendrick, MD — talk about suppressed knowledge ( in this case about Cardiovascular Disease) from days of old.
Kendrick (re-) asserts the thrombotic hypothesis of heart disease, and it is brilliant and full of wry commentary like AG’s. Of course, the cholesterol hypothesis — partly because it was so money making for Pharma and partly because little was known about the endothelium — shoved all that theorizing aside. I highly commend this book, esp if you have atherosclerosis like me.
Re the NAM symposium address: the portion on gender is reasonable. The speaker doesn’t ever back off of the fact that there are two sexes. The one paragraph on gender, after the sentence you quoted, states “including the impact of hormonal therapy started at different stages in the life cycle.” To my knowledge, we don’t necessarily know the impacts of cross-sex hormones on long term male or female human health, let alone whether it matters whether those treatments start in childhood or not. This speaker is tacitly saying, let’s not avoid finding out the truth, even inconvenient ones.
You left out the meat of the paragraph in question. "We need to expand the study of gender to include gender minorities and to develop strategies to study the health of transgender people across the life span, including the impact of hormonal therapy started at different stages in the life cycle. We must learn how to include the trans population in clinical trials—now." The fantasy group "Gender minorities" is made up of males and females. The title of the article is "Science and Sex: A Bold Agenda for Women’s Health." The specified paragraph was, imo, rammed in there to pander to hysterical males and progressives with a mental health problem. That has no place in a discussion of women's health with a goal of getting researchers to study and record results by sex.
We certainly know about the negative impact on bone development that starts early on — which, being irreversible, is “long term.” Same for reproductive development.
Wanted to thank you for something worth reading and the way in way in which you write. I always believed, but never understood or experienced so many of these classics filled with Truth. My father taught Shakespeare for years and I learned (through osmosis somehow - he never taught me) and felt his enthusiasm for works such as these. I may give Confessions a try with the guides you suggested. What a gift! Cheers!
In my third grade I likely would have been a target for Ritalin, the Big R, if they had had it in 1960. The world outside the class window was far more interesting than the teacher.
A few years ago the parents of my Godson called in a bit of a panic, as the school wanted him to be assessed for ADHD so he could start R. My advice was brief- unless the teacher is tested first, don't let them near him.
I have retrieved my parents' set of the Britannica Great Books, and have ambitions to make it through at some point. I now look forward to St. Augustine. My favourites as a child were the Iliad and The Odyssey, conveniently early in the collection. Possibly reading Malthus and Machiavelli at age fifteen was not conducive to my proper socialisation!
Appreciate the Confessions recommendation and the study resources. I haven't made it through Confessions yet. I tried to listen to it on audiobook, which didn't work for me with this book.
On the topic of classic books, if you or others want to instantly build a solid library of classic public domain works, including those of Augustine, look at Project Gutenberg.
The only problem is that some longer works (like Augustine's City of God) show up in multiple parts. I used software to push them back together.
Consider buying an e-reader, which is much easier on the eyes than an ordinary screen. I was a late adopter to the technology, but at zero cost, I've put an enormous library of books on mine that I should have already read, and I'm now working my way through them. I'm also someone who likes to bounce between books or pick up something different based on my mood, so the e-reader is great for that.
I can't recall if you've stated your theology but monergism.com also has a very good library of classic, mostly Reformed Christian e-books:
If anyone else knows of any good resources on classic books like these, I'd like to hear of them. I know that archive.org has some but it hasn't worked as well for me.
My dear sir, the reading of old books on an e - reader is a depressing idea to me. I love the feel and smell and weight, even if slight, of an actual book.
Rod Dreher and others frequently mention the need to buy hard copies of books. We can't know that when the young intellectual aristocrats whom we are presently "educating" in universities if they aren't out yammering en masse about a river and a sea they cannot name gain political power, they won't try to make old books unavailable on the Internet. Having been indoctrinated as reliably as Mao's Red Guards, they're almost certainly not going to settle for anything less.
Have you read "Fahrenheit 451?" If ever a book was prophetic, it is. We who have some purchase on truth and sanity need to be building our own little libraries, and we need to find a way to link up with other guardians of the good things across the nation. How to avert detection by Our Minders is another question. It may be time for the carrier pigeon to make a comeback.
I'm curious if you know the following: a few years ago, the Edward Stratemyer syndicate, which with the employment of a score or more of writers gave us The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and others of that much beloved little genre, went through all of its books, scrubbing them of any allusions to normality and replacing them with Newthink.
As a besotted fan of The Hardy Boys when I was a child ( I once used a magnifying glass to look for Bayport on the upper East coast ), I don't want to know what they've done to those characters. I might liken this to a grieving parent's not wanting to look at the mangled body of an adored child killed in an accident.
I don't know but can imagine that Aunt Gertrude is not so subtly portrayed as an out lesbian, that friend Tony has been replaced with Mohammed, you get the point.
Matters are so bad that there is a Facebook group for Hardy fans who are always on the lookout for unreformed copies. Our society within my lifetime ( 72 ) used to force pornophiles into clandestine hunts for what gratified them. Now, it's the Hardy boys.
Nancy Drew fan here, also Hardy Boys. My Dad was stationed in Germany when
I was 10 and my Mom and I visited for a few weeks. I tore through all the Nancy Drew mysteries that I could check out from the base library and remember reading many of them whilst sitting on top of a dryer at the laundromat.
I can relate to the sentimentality in your first sentence. I still have plenty of physical books in my house. But to me, it’s an error to let that sentimentality be an obstacle to reading more than I would otherwise read. I imagine that some millennia ago there were some who lamented the replacement of scrolls with codices.
I also think it’s wise to consider the possibility of ebooks being censored. That’s why I didn’t start by pointing out that Amazon has a number of classic ebooks (not nearly as extensive as the Gutenberg collection) that you can access easily and for free if you’re a Prime subscriber. A little more convenient, but now you don’t own anything. If you download it from a source like Gutenberg, you can back it up on all your devices and send it to anyone in the world. Electronic preservation of documents is going to remain important.
I wasn’t aware of that Hardy Boys censorship. But I was aware that Roald Dahl’s The Witches received some censorship. Then in an amusing parallel, they recently remade the movie for HBO Max, and then deleted it.
Had you known that it's now been fairly reliably proven that reading words on an electronic screen over time impairs one's ability to read words on a page of paper?
There have been several books written about this. The first, and possibly the best, is a book called "The Shallows." I wish I could remember the author's name - Carr, maybe?
It isn't just sentimentality with me. I hate the Internet for anything but watching movies and old television shows. And I do think it has impaired my reading of physical books.
I try to avoid any books written in the past decade or so. Stick with the classics.
Excellent Sir! Absolutely excellent!!
Your writing confirms things my poor mind could never fully grasp and convey. Thank you Sir. So very clearly and we’ll written!
What a splendid article - thank you.
GREAT opening analogy man! And I love the title. Could be a good book title. I started Confessions a few months ago, and I have felt the same way about it. Timeless insights. God bless my brother, looking forward to the unnamed future project!
Thank you!
This recalls a Dave Rubin chat with Dennis Prager and his time at Columbia U. Prager said that he has had one epiphany in life, which is that “fear of God is the beginning of wisdom,” and he realized there was no wisdom at Columbia University during his grad school days all the way back in the 1970s.
Also speaking of medicine gone bad, I am at seven weeks post triple bypass and I have just finished reading a book called The Clot Thickens by GP and medical detective and statin skeptic, Scotsman Malcolm Kendrick, MD — talk about suppressed knowledge ( in this case about Cardiovascular Disease) from days of old.
Kendrick (re-) asserts the thrombotic hypothesis of heart disease, and it is brilliant and full of wry commentary like AG’s. Of course, the cholesterol hypothesis — partly because it was so money making for Pharma and partly because little was known about the endothelium — shoved all that theorizing aside. I highly commend this book, esp if you have atherosclerosis like me.
Sounds like something I need to read.
Also, thank-you for linking the stack about the eclipse! That was a wonderful article!
Re the NAM symposium address: the portion on gender is reasonable. The speaker doesn’t ever back off of the fact that there are two sexes. The one paragraph on gender, after the sentence you quoted, states “including the impact of hormonal therapy started at different stages in the life cycle.” To my knowledge, we don’t necessarily know the impacts of cross-sex hormones on long term male or female human health, let alone whether it matters whether those treatments start in childhood or not. This speaker is tacitly saying, let’s not avoid finding out the truth, even inconvenient ones.
You left out the meat of the paragraph in question. "We need to expand the study of gender to include gender minorities and to develop strategies to study the health of transgender people across the life span, including the impact of hormonal therapy started at different stages in the life cycle. We must learn how to include the trans population in clinical trials—now." The fantasy group "Gender minorities" is made up of males and females. The title of the article is "Science and Sex: A Bold Agenda for Women’s Health." The specified paragraph was, imo, rammed in there to pander to hysterical males and progressives with a mental health problem. That has no place in a discussion of women's health with a goal of getting researchers to study and record results by sex.
We certainly know about the negative impact on bone development that starts early on — which, being irreversible, is “long term.” Same for reproductive development.
Wanted to thank you for something worth reading and the way in way in which you write. I always believed, but never understood or experienced so many of these classics filled with Truth. My father taught Shakespeare for years and I learned (through osmosis somehow - he never taught me) and felt his enthusiasm for works such as these. I may give Confessions a try with the guides you suggested. What a gift! Cheers!
In my third grade I likely would have been a target for Ritalin, the Big R, if they had had it in 1960. The world outside the class window was far more interesting than the teacher.
A few years ago the parents of my Godson called in a bit of a panic, as the school wanted him to be assessed for ADHD so he could start R. My advice was brief- unless the teacher is tested first, don't let them near him.
I have retrieved my parents' set of the Britannica Great Books, and have ambitions to make it through at some point. I now look forward to St. Augustine. My favourites as a child were the Iliad and The Odyssey, conveniently early in the collection. Possibly reading Malthus and Machiavelli at age fifteen was not conducive to my proper socialisation!
Have missed your writings Adrien.
Thank you for a great post…now, to start with Augustine or Aquinas? Choices, choices, what wonderful choices!
Appreciate the Confessions recommendation and the study resources. I haven't made it through Confessions yet. I tried to listen to it on audiobook, which didn't work for me with this book.
On the topic of classic books, if you or others want to instantly build a solid library of classic public domain works, including those of Augustine, look at Project Gutenberg.
https://www.gutenberg.org/
The only problem is that some longer works (like Augustine's City of God) show up in multiple parts. I used software to push them back together.
Consider buying an e-reader, which is much easier on the eyes than an ordinary screen. I was a late adopter to the technology, but at zero cost, I've put an enormous library of books on mine that I should have already read, and I'm now working my way through them. I'm also someone who likes to bounce between books or pick up something different based on my mood, so the e-reader is great for that.
I can't recall if you've stated your theology but monergism.com also has a very good library of classic, mostly Reformed Christian e-books:
https://www.monergism.com/1000-free-ebooks-listed-alphabetically-author
If anyone else knows of any good resources on classic books like these, I'd like to hear of them. I know that archive.org has some but it hasn't worked as well for me.
My dear sir, the reading of old books on an e - reader is a depressing idea to me. I love the feel and smell and weight, even if slight, of an actual book.
Rod Dreher and others frequently mention the need to buy hard copies of books. We can't know that when the young intellectual aristocrats whom we are presently "educating" in universities if they aren't out yammering en masse about a river and a sea they cannot name gain political power, they won't try to make old books unavailable on the Internet. Having been indoctrinated as reliably as Mao's Red Guards, they're almost certainly not going to settle for anything less.
Have you read "Fahrenheit 451?" If ever a book was prophetic, it is. We who have some purchase on truth and sanity need to be building our own little libraries, and we need to find a way to link up with other guardians of the good things across the nation. How to avert detection by Our Minders is another question. It may be time for the carrier pigeon to make a comeback.
I'm curious if you know the following: a few years ago, the Edward Stratemyer syndicate, which with the employment of a score or more of writers gave us The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Tom Swift, and others of that much beloved little genre, went through all of its books, scrubbing them of any allusions to normality and replacing them with Newthink.
As a besotted fan of The Hardy Boys when I was a child ( I once used a magnifying glass to look for Bayport on the upper East coast ), I don't want to know what they've done to those characters. I might liken this to a grieving parent's not wanting to look at the mangled body of an adored child killed in an accident.
I don't know but can imagine that Aunt Gertrude is not so subtly portrayed as an out lesbian, that friend Tony has been replaced with Mohammed, you get the point.
Matters are so bad that there is a Facebook group for Hardy fans who are always on the lookout for unreformed copies. Our society within my lifetime ( 72 ) used to force pornophiles into clandestine hunts for what gratified them. Now, it's the Hardy boys.
Nancy Drew fan here, also Hardy Boys. My Dad was stationed in Germany when
I was 10 and my Mom and I visited for a few weeks. I tore through all the Nancy Drew mysteries that I could check out from the base library and remember reading many of them whilst sitting on top of a dryer at the laundromat.
It's typical of them, because they're totalitarian, to violate everything which is warm, human, normal.
I can relate to the sentimentality in your first sentence. I still have plenty of physical books in my house. But to me, it’s an error to let that sentimentality be an obstacle to reading more than I would otherwise read. I imagine that some millennia ago there were some who lamented the replacement of scrolls with codices.
I also think it’s wise to consider the possibility of ebooks being censored. That’s why I didn’t start by pointing out that Amazon has a number of classic ebooks (not nearly as extensive as the Gutenberg collection) that you can access easily and for free if you’re a Prime subscriber. A little more convenient, but now you don’t own anything. If you download it from a source like Gutenberg, you can back it up on all your devices and send it to anyone in the world. Electronic preservation of documents is going to remain important.
I wasn’t aware of that Hardy Boys censorship. But I was aware that Roald Dahl’s The Witches received some censorship. Then in an amusing parallel, they recently remade the movie for HBO Max, and then deleted it.
Had you known that it's now been fairly reliably proven that reading words on an electronic screen over time impairs one's ability to read words on a page of paper?
There have been several books written about this. The first, and possibly the best, is a book called "The Shallows." I wish I could remember the author's name - Carr, maybe?
It isn't just sentimentality with me. I hate the Internet for anything but watching movies and old television shows. And I do think it has impaired my reading of physical books.