Fri 4 Aug 2006
In Exordium 1, I was immediately aware that I had not spent my money in vain. Andrew Kern kicked off the conference with a stirring talk. Here are a few highlights:
- Knowledge is transformative.
- We are created to know God.
- Adam knew Eve. This was not merely physical.
- The solution to life: Active Love.
- Active love embraces reality.
- Education should not lead to cynicism.
- Cynicism equals death.
- Classical education can produce cynicism and arrogance. It should produce humility.
- The modern mind cannot know since there is no connection between thinking and living.
- Nominalism is the idea that ideas cannot be known.
- Will Durant ” Men ceased to dispute and started to search.” Abandoning authority.
- Knowledge is what the 5 senses give us.
- Education is not efficient.
- Relationships are not efficient.
- Embrace wth the soul the world God has given us.
- Science is now the slave of politics.
- Plato ” Grace and Harmony are the twin sisters of goodness and virtue.”
- Do what you can.
- Embrace limits.
Suggested reading: Wendell Berry Standing by Words.
Whew. No wonder I loved that session. I was reminded of Richard Weaver’s notes on generalization in The Southern Tradition at Bay.
It is useless to argue against generalization, a world without generalization would be a world without knowledge. The chaotic and fragmentary thinking of the modern age is due largely to an apprehensiveness, inspired by empirical methods, over images, wholes, general truths so that we are intimidated from reaching the conclusions we must live by.
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This comment just came to my email box and then disappeared. I thought I would go ahead and post it for the commenter.
“I can’t help but think of the verse “knowledge puffs up” when reading this post. Sounds like just a bunch of “high fallutin’ mumbo jumbo” to me.
What in the world did you SAY???”
Comment by Cindy (August 4, 2006 @ 3:00 pm )
I feel I can say this since I know you so well.;) Being so excited about your conference and hearing one of the CD’s which you lent me (for such a short time), I went over to Lynne’s notes and read through them. They were wonderful. They were more like the notes I take ~ LONG. More like an essay than notes! You take notes the way Pat says I should ~short and to the point. But I can’t gather anything from notes like that. All that to say that the above anonymous “poster” might profit from reading Lynne’s. (I still love you, Cindy, even though you post bad notes!)
Comment by Linda (August 4, 2006 @ 7:03 pm )
Actually I made a concious decision not to post my notes in their original form lest the ideas get lost.
I will try to do a little better with the next set. I have to say that rereading through my notes in my notebook, has gotten my jazzed up all over again.
Comment by Cindy (August 4, 2006 @ 9:11 pm )
I started simply to post my bulleted notes (similar to yours), but then looked at them and didn’t think they’d make any sense to anyone who wasn’t there to hear Andrew. I also had all kinds of thoughts swirling through my head as I typed them up. With all that going on, I had to go back and re-write them to make them more coherent and to include my own rabbit-trails. I’m glad they were a blessing to Linda (do I know Linda?). You may have posted a rough draft this time, but you usually write beautifully! I’m sure you’ll outshine me next time.
Comment by Lynne (August 5, 2006 @ 12:27 am )
I forgive you, Lynne
Comment by Cindy (August 5, 2006 @ 5:55 am )
Can you expand on “embrace limits”? (heehee -expand on limits!)
Comment by karen (August 5, 2006 @ 6:42 am )
Very nice! I was thinking as I read, “This reminds me of Richard Weaver.” How very gratifying to get to the end, and find what else but…a quote by Richard Weaver! (No, I didn’t peek.)
Admittedly, one has to get used to these ideas or they might not make sense at first glance. Maybe that’s what your first commenter meant. I had to get used to Weaver’s way of writing, too. It was very abstract and Platonic reading right after Joel Salatin! (If you’ve read Joel Salatin, as I think you have, I hope you’re grinning.)
Comment by Laura A (August 5, 2006 @ 7:06 am )
I tend to think in the abstract. This is not something that I am proud of at all. I wish it were otherwise every single day.
Linda, on the other hand, is infinitely more practical than I am. Several times she has read a book and told me about it. Then when I got the book and read it I got something totally different from it. Strange!
Comment by Cindy (August 5, 2006 @ 10:08 am )
Ok, Karen, now that I have a few minutes I will try and hit on “embrace limits”?
Andrew used an illustration from Wendell Berry’s Standing on Words about marriage to illustrate how limits free us.
Marriage is by nature limiting. When we embrace those limits we are free to enjoy all the benefits of the marriage relationship. When we reject those limits we become a slave to lust and lack of depth in our relationships. So by embracing limits we find freedom but by rejecting limits we find ourselves lost in a vast ocean of confusion.
Wendell Berry says this in a much more poetic way but they weren’t selling that book at the confernece.
Comment by Cindy (August 5, 2006 @ 10:52 am )
Not Berry, but I ran across this Wordsworth sonnet at someone’s blog a month or so ago.
Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, into which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.
Comment by Kelly (August 5, 2006 @ 1:32 pm )