Uncategorized

Charlie Brooker: Chores and Cosmos

By Caleb | September 8, 2009

Charlie Brooker, favourite misanthrope of Guardian readers everywhere (after David Simon, of course) yesterday claimed that Contemplating the scale of the universe makes a mockery of household chores. Funnily enough, the relationship between cosmos and chores was one of the topics I mentioned in my wedding speech, but I came to a rather different conclusion: […]

Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Does television destroy imagination?

By Caleb | September 6, 2009

Film and television are sometimes criticised as requiring less imagination than reading. If we can already see exactly what the characters look like, if the actors and designers and directors have already captured so much detail on screen, what’s left for us to imagine? On the other hand, there are people who see this as […]

Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Two Foundations

By Caleb | August 30, 2009

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician and philosopher, wrote a fragmentary set of thoughts that he planned to develop into a defence of the Christian faith, but never finished called Pensées. He has many interesting observations and ideas on all sorts of subjects – it’s almost as if he’d written a blog! Part of Pascal’s brilliance […]

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Wedding words and reasons

By Caleb | August 21, 2009

I saw via the Boundless blog an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about the fashion for individually-written wedding vows. Beverley and I put a lot of thought into our wedding vows and into our marriage service, so I’ll try and explain some of our thinking here… When it came to planning the wedding, […]

Also posted in Personal | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Are our opinions about art only subjective?

By Caleb | August 16, 2009

Recently Roger Ebert provoked quite a reaction with his trashing of Michael Bay’s multi-million dollar sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Many people who enjoyed the film reacted angrily – surely if they liked it, then it was good for them? But Ebert had the audacity not just to personally dislike the film, but insisted […]

Tagged , | Leave a comment

Related posts

By Caleb | August 12, 2009

I’ve started using LinkWithin to automatically add links to related posts on my blog, to make it easier to find posts on similar subjects. (However, you won’t be able to see them if you’re reading using a blog aggregator like Google Reader or Bloglines, or if you have Javascript disabled). Some of the links can […]

Tagged | 2 Comments

Astrology and determinism

By Caleb | August 10, 2009

I recently read a discussion on an internet forum of astrology. Someone asked if astrology is internally consistent. Astrology can make sense within certain worldviews and models of the universe. In medieval times, it was generally accepted that the stars exerted some level of influence. C S Lewis’s The Discarded Image gives a good presentation […]

Tagged | 3 Comments

Islam and democracy: clash of civilizations?

By Caleb | August 9, 2009

There are two mistakes people make about Muslims: one is thinking that every Muslim wants Islam to rule the world, and one is thinking that no Muslim wants Islam to rule the world. Islam is a missionary religion, and one that doesn’t allow the easy compartmentalising of life into sacred and secular. Even in Western […]

Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Has feminism gone nuts?

By Caleb | August 7, 2009

The Times has an interesting article titled When Feminism went nuts: How did it come to this? When the lads’ weekly magazines were launched five years ago where were the voices arguing that titles with 30 pairs of breasts an issue and a harsh misogynist tone — “Win your girlfriend a boob job” — were […]

Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The "worst" bits of the Bible?

By Caleb | August 3, 2009

Ship of Fools is carrying out a survey called Chapter and Worse asking for people’s “worst” Bible verses. Why? Because the Bible is probably the most important book ever, but it sometimes seems that the only people who care about it are rival gangs of fundamentalists, Christian and atheist, determined to beat it into the […]

Tagged , | 1 Comment