Thursday, July 31, 2014

Very Smart People Only Need Apply. (Dumb: don't bother)'

Very Smart People Only Need Consider:
The same kind of thinking that got us into the mess,
Einstein says blithely, can’t be the kind that gets us out,
the kind of thinking that creates the problem can’t be
the kind that solves it.  What kind of thinking can think
about the 2 different kinds so as to distinguish them
and not allow them to  bleed into each other, collapse,
conflate, confuse, and contaminate?  Say. 1, 2, and
3 kinds needed.

Via Negativa: to watch the ways I accentuate the positive
so as to steer clear & consider the remainders of the daze
eclipsed by my sunshine & banished as misfortune,
bootie tossed out with the bath water and  know that noise
is always source and  resource for the news.

How to contain the common sense so it don’t contaminate
uncommon, know what I’m saying? Some  hokum’s razor
needed to cut a sharp line dividing cross roads where
common  sense peters out and nonsense begins to play it up
not to mention no-sense-at-all hovering its universal presence
ongoing over the mother of the mothers of invention.

13 comments:

  1. http://blogs.lcms.org/2014/rosa-young-movie

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  2. With a nod toward civil-rights icon Rosa Parks — who famously refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger on Dec. 1, 1955 — the new film is titled “The First Rosa: Teacher, Confessor, Church Planter.”

    “There was another Rosa, but our Rosa was the first,” notes the documentary’s film trailer. “Rosa Parks started a civil-rights revolution. Our Rosa started a spiritual revolution.”

    African-American educator Rosa Young was only 22 when she decided to open her own school for black children in the rural south in 1912. With funding from The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, Young ultimately started 30 schools, including what is today Concordia College Alabama, Selma. Young died in 1971 at the age of 81.

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  3. The year Rosa died, we arrived at Warren Wilson--founded and supported by the Presbyterian Board of Missions in 1894--for impoverished Appalachian young men--offering work and spiritual and secular instruction. Last year Newsweek called it the most liberal college in the nation.

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  4. 1971 I attended Mary Ward Gymnasium for girls only. Founder: English nun.

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  5. Gymnasium: "naked training" School - L. schola - leisure time.

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  6. They are still Roman Catholic. My father stood in line early in the morning to get me in. There were four Gymnasiums in that city of 60 000. And there were 6000 American soldiers. I took public transportation every day crossing the Konrad Adenauer bridge. Once, the bus was so full that I fainted, in summer.

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  7. In the 40's my mother and women of the Johnstown Presbyterian church packaged and packed bundles of clothing to ship to Old Farm School in NC--tossed off a slow moving train in Swannanoa and picked up by boys from the school. This action was the event that led via a series of circumstances 30 years later to our joining the college community.

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  8. Mary Ward was for girls: emphasis--modern languages. Dessauer was for boys: emphasis--math and science. Humanist was for boys and girls: emphasis--Greek language and arts.

    Maybe there were only three. This was near Frankfurt but in Bavaria. In Bavaria everything is conservative and Catholic. At every corner stands a red sandstone crucifix, in this area. If you could not handle the Gymnasium in Bavaria you crossed the border to the west and went to Gymnasium in Hesse, where things are more liberal, Protestant and easy. Truly, there was a lot of pressure, but I have it as the good old days.

    There are huge benefits to Christian education, as Rosa saw. We should think about them and not just stamp it anti- science/modern... Just because you won't make yourself believe that all life came from sludge and man came from orangutans, does not mean that you are stupid.

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  9. Just because you don't believe God created the universe in 6 days and knelt down on his knees to spit in the dust and make Adam and then pull a rib for Eve doesn't mean you aren't devout. Of course if you reduce science to religious terms and values and/or reduce religion to science terms and values you may be stunned stupid and unaware. Warren Wilson used to require chapel attendance--separate boys dorms and girls dorms, have curfew hours for visitation. Prayer at the beginning of all faculty meetings. Faculty used to work in the work program, one month in the summer, one week during breaks. Everyone lived on campus. Housing was part of the salary package. The President dressed as Santa Claus gave gifts to the campus children. Good old days.

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  10. I don't claim to know how God did it exactly. I just know it is incredibly astonishing and science won't be doing much better at explaining it, either, ever. There are limits to knowledge and just because they don't have the answer yet does not mean they are going to find it.

    We were talking tonight about how we used to invent skits for weddings and events, but nobody does that any more. It is not cool, somehow. Too bad. Good old days.

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  11. Home made skits are a little like the home made opening prayers. They were a live thing dealing with present issues and persons.

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  12. Lots of things aren't cool anymore. Nostalgia - "agony for the home." Do you remember the song "These are the Good Old Days"? Ever watch old movies--how uncool, loud talking men in hats. My orthodox Presbyterian talks like a prophet--words like depraved, children of wrath, god's enemies abominations, dung...Not cool. My old man would direct and produce Christmas pageant skits--wise men and shepards watching their flocks by night. Joseph and Mary and Magi.

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  13. We still have those. Little kids and Mary and Joseph and song... Chesterton declares all the secular invented occasions don't have this power, try as they might.

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