Seeking the truth...

5  Who is that coming up from the wilderness,    leaning upon her beloved? Under the apple tree I awakened you. There your mother was in labour with you;    there she who bore you was in labour. 6  Set me as a seal upon your heart,    as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death,    passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire,    a raging flame. 7  Many waters cannot quench love,    neither can floods drown it. If one offered for love    all the wealth of one’s house,    it would be utterly scorned. 8  We have a little sister,    and she has no breasts. What shall we do for our sister,    on the day when she is spoken for? 9  If she is a wall,    we will build upon her a battlement of silver; but if she is a door,    we will enclos...

I've been extraordinarily busy at work lately so I'm barely getting this out before Christmas.. Oh well. I still want to keep up the tradition and briefly mention the best five books that I read for the first time in 2012. This year was the year of the long books so my volume, again, was a little lower, but I believe I made up for it with quality. Anyways, here's the list! 5. History of Sexuality Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure by Michel Foucault All three volumes are worth reading, but this one stuck out to me the most by showing that the way(s) we have thought about sex and sexuality over the past few hundred years is far from the only way. The heavy citation of primary source material also makes this book invaluable. Anyone studying sexual ethics needs to wrestle with this book. 4. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien I read this on my flight to China and back. Even though I knew the whole story it was a very rich and enjoyable read. I love the way Tol...

...Christian faith, being God's witness in us, can be understood only as the answer to this interior and intimate self-witnessing of the God who opens up the secrets of his Heart as he gives himself to humanity. This is a first and most formal affirmation, and one which must proceed all those particular modalities which are related to man's concrete condition: his sinful turning away from God, his blindness and obstinacy, and finally, those things which grace works in him - his conversion, his breaking, his humbling and his exultation. Faith is participation in the free self-disclosure of God's interior life and light, just as the spiritual nature of the creature means participation in the unveild-ness of all reality, which in one way or another must also include the divine reality. The created spirit does not "deduce" this reality (in which God is included in whatever way) from indications and logical premises; as spirit, it is from the very start set in the ligh...

The end of the 2012 portion of season 7 occurred two months ago. Ever since I've wanted to do a write-up on Amy Pond but I've been too busy with work to pull it off. Things aren't slowing down any, but I miss blogging to the degree that I'm going to write this post anyways. You'll get this post on Amy today, and at some point in the near future I'll write a comparison post or posts on Amy and Rory vs. Rose and Mickey. As you can probably tell, I love Doctor Who. I'm a fan. I like almost everything I've seen. That doesn't mean that I'm not critical at the same time. I MUCH prefer the writing of Russel T. Davies over that of Steven Moffat. There are several reasons for that and I want to focus on one of them in this post. While writing strong episodes, Moffat struggles to develop his characters. In fact, I would say that Amy is neither believable nor, honestly, very interesting, or perhaps, better put, important. At the start of season five ...