Life’s Paradox

as a thank you to our fans for your continued support, we are giving away the new nine inch nails album one hundred percent free, exclusively via nin.com.

the music is available in a variety of formats including high-quality MP3, FLAC or M4A lossless at CD quality and even higher-than-CD quality 24/96 WAVE. your link will include all options - all free. all downloads include a PDF with artwork and credits.

for those of you interested in physical products, fear not. we plan to make a version of this release available on CD and vinyl in july. details coming soon.

Album info…

1. 999,999
2. 1,000,000
3. letting you
4. discipline
5. echoplex
6. head down
7. lights in the sky
8. corona radiata
9. the four of us are dying
10. demon seed

length: 43:45

streaming audio available at iLike.

the slip is licensed under a creative commons attribution non-commercial share alike license.

we encourage you to
remix it
share it with your friends,
post it on your blog,
play it on your podcast,
give it to strangers,
etc.

This is insane.  And already incredibly soon after Ghosts! Did he say creative commons?! Awesome!

Click here to download.

Piggy-backing somewhat off of Dave’s earlier post here, my friend Brian Lewis-Beevers sent the following link to me:

Local Heroes: Seattle Teacher Suspended for Refusing to Give Standardized Test

Carl Chew, a 6th grade science teacher at Nathan Eckstein Middle School in the Seattle School District, last week defied federal, state, and district regulations that require teachers to administer the Washington Assessment of Student Learning to students.

“I have let my administration know that I will no longer give the WASL to my students. I have done this because of the personal moral and ethical conviction that the WASL is harmful to students, teachers, schools, and families,” wrote Chew in an email to national supporters.

School District response to Mr. Chew’s refusal was immediate. After administrative attempts to dissuade his act of civil disobedience had failed, at the start of school on the first day of WASL testing, April 15, Mr. Chew was escorted from the school by the building principal and a district supervisor. Mr. Chew was told to report to the district Science Materials Center where he was put to work preparing student science kits while district administration and attorneys consulted on an appropriate penalty for what was labeled, “gross insubordination.”

Read the rest here.  Chew gives a helpful list of reasons why that particular standardized test is erroneous.

Yes, my motivation for posting this stems from personal experience.  Mainly, I just don’t do well on standardized test.  I don’t flunk them, but, I do have an inability to do better on them the second time around.  It’s really disconcerting… they mess with my mind, to put it lightly.  I took the SAT twice in high school, and did about 100 points worse the second time around; I recently had a similar experience with the GRE, doing significantly worse the second time around.  But, I get pretty good grades in school, I think.  In high school, I was taught to write essays, not fill in bubbles.

I am aware that not everybody can even be in a financial position to take these tests a first time, let alone a second time.  My concern in posting this isn’t so much on college and graduate school entrance exams, but that around this country, most states start administering standardized tests like this when they are quite young, causing children around the nation to have warped views of their own ability to learn and perform in academic settings.  Kudos to Mr. Chew!

The absolute paradox would be if the Son of God became man, came to the world, went around in such a manner that absolutely no one recognized him; if he became an individual human being in the strictest sense of the world, a person who had a trade, got married, etc. . . . In that case God would not have been God and Father of mankind, but the greatest ironist. . . . The divine paradox is that he becomes noticed, if in no other fashion, then by being crucified, by performing miracles, etc., which means that he is recognizable, after all, by his divine authority, even if faith is required in order to solve its paradox.[1]

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[1] From Kierkegaard’s journals as quoted in Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, p. 265, emphasis mine.  C.f. Kierkegaard, Point of View, p. 16.

When I first read this, I missed the difference between absolute and divine. Wow. If this is a real difference, and I think it is, this is an extremely illuminating passage from Kierkegaard’s journals. I only wish that there were better citations in Garff’s biography so that I could find this passage easier for the full context. Although journals are often fragmentary, so maybe there is not much more (?).  Those are Garff’s ellipses above though, not mine, so I dunno.

This is really cool.  Guillermo del Toro is one of my all-time-favorite directors, so I am pleased.  Great picture of them up there too, eh?  But, every time I hear that del Toro is directing another remake or sequel, a smart part of me dies inside wondering if this will ever see the light of day…

Canon Press’ books, which includes Peter Leithart’s Against Christianity, are now free in full text on Google Books.

(via)

As a follow up to the first “Nazbo Rap” made 2 years ago, I present to you “Nazbo Rap II.” This was released yesterday. Most of this video was shot on the PLNU campus and in the First Church Eclipse Chapel, and was made by current PLNU undergrads. I’d be interested to see a list of credits. It’s catchy, well-edited, but of course, dripping with ridiculous cheese! There’s some weird stuff here and there, but it’s entertaining nonetheless.

In an article, Kierkegaard says that if the second edition of Practice in Christianity were being published for the first time, it would not

have been by a pseudonym, but by myself . . . Earlier, my idea had been that if the established order could be defended, this was the only way of doing so: by poetically (therefore, by a pseudonym) passing judgment upon it. . . . Now, on the other hand, I am completely convinced of two things: both that, from a Christian point of view, the established order is untenable and that every day it exists is, from the Christian point of view, a crime; and that one may not call upon grace in this manner.  Therefore, take the pseudonymity away; take away the thrice-repeated preface and the ‘Moral’ to the first section—then, from a Christian point of view, Practice in Christianity is an attack on the established order (As quoted in Joakim Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005], p. 751, emphasis mine).

Nonetheless, prior to this, Kierkegaard appended an unpaginated “A First and Last Declaration” to the end of Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments–where he ‘outs’ himself as the author behind the pseudonyms–which contains the request, “If it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the [pseudonymous] books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine.”

However, as Garff points out, when Practice in Christianity was originally sent to press, it was veronymously written by Kierkegaard.  It was only at the last minute that Kierkegaard changed the authorship to Anti-Climacus, “because Kierkegaard’s own ‘existence’ did not live up to the radical Christian requirements in the work” (p. 630-2).  As Garff points out, this change was fueled more but personal concerns regarding Kierkegaard and not maieutic considerations concerning the reader.

Even if Kierkegaard wants us to now read Practice in Christianity with the pseudonymity ‘taken away’, ultimately, Anti-Climacus’ point remains concerning indirect communication in the section on the “Categories of Offense.”  If we take Anti-Climacus off the title page and replace it with the original “S. Kierkegaard,” the case holds that we are still receiving a communication from an indirect communicator—the God-man.  Kierkegaard had exhausted—in fact literally and ironically emptied—the tool of pseudonymity of its usefulness.  Garff also states that toward the end, “Kierkegaard continually adjusted his [pseudonymous] writings so that they corresponded as precisely as possible to his own position.”  As Kierkegaard stated in the conclusion to his dissertation, “Irony as the negative is the way; it is not the truth but the way.”

[This has been adapted from part of my in-progress MA thesis.]

One of the oldest electronic instruments, the theremin in this video was used to do a cover of Gnarles Barkley’s “Crazy.”

We recently begun singing the Lord’s Prayer in our liturgy at church. This video captures the hilarity of our finitude as I think only 1 in 50 people actually has the vocal range to sing this song without straining!

Wait, Socrates was white?!

Well, obviously, I wasn’t able to make it to the theological symposium on the Analogia Entis.  In being buried underneath thesis work, I kind of forgot about it, which is probably for the best.  It’s starting today and goes to Sunday.  Anyway, aside from Joel Garver, did anybody else go?  I’d love to hear a report.

For those that actually hop over to my blog to read (and not just RSS), I’ve updated a few things.  I had to tweak the current theme to put the ‘pages’ back into the header (about me, papers, thesis reading books, etc.).  I also added a few feeds in the sidebar: one to my dorky Facebook status updates, and one to my Tumblr blog of things I’ve been reading/watching lately.

Music-wise, I’ve been dipping back into my CD collection and listening to things that I haven’t listened to in quite some time to help keep me stimulated during the writing process:

• Squarepusher - Big Loada
• Alice in Chains - Unplugged (probably one of my favorite albums of all time, actually.  where were you?!)
• VNV Nation - Matter + Form (hands-down my favorite VNVN album but for some reason it fell out of my usual rotation.)
• Mayfairgrin - Equine Noir: The Ambient Selections (probably my favorite moody ambient album ever.  you can hop over to my last.fm page and see how many times I’ve listened to this gem in the past few years.)
• 30 Seconds to Mars - A Beautiful Lie (now, I understand why a lot of people don’t like this band as it is one of the quintessential emo rock bands, but I absolutely love this album and really think Jared Leto’s voice is awesome.  I usually play this on repeat after 11pm when things start to drag for me during paper writing.)
• Nirvana - Nevermind and In Utero (just classic 90’s fun)
• Apoptygma Berzerk - Welcome to Earth and Harmonizer (still not a fan of their stuff post-Harmonizer though… )

Of all the April Fool’s gags I saw online, this one was probably my favorite: World of Warcraft: Molten Core.

I recently got new glasses.  The last time I got a pair of  corrective lenses was my freshman year of highschool.  I had contacts for a while after that and used them for a while but got lazy.  I can now see road signs!

Minimal update: I fixed a grip of typos in this post… I was up till 4am last night so I am a bit out of it.

I am no stranger to book covers. Having designed the covers in two book series, this has sparked some fun discussions with my friend Kaz over the evolution of cover design, especially in theology and philosophy books.

Most book covers until recent times have been about careful text placement on usually a single-color background. To illustrate just a few examples, see, for instance, the bright red cover to the Krell-edited Basic Writings of Heidegger; the simple large text upon white of Charles Taylor’s Hegel and Modern Society; the original cover to Hauerwas’ The Peaceable Kingdom, which ups the ante a bit by applying a radial orange-yellow gradient; the highly recognizeable two-tone covers of Princeton’s Kierkegaard Writings series with SK’s portrait at the two-tone intersection. And from here, more multi-tone and pictures are introduced so that there really does not seem to be much of a limit in design any longer, outside of the usual printing costs.

Enter Continuum Press, namely, their Continuum Impacts series. These are reprints of well-known philosophical texts that have already established themselves in the history of philosophy, most of them being within the wider contintental tradition, with plenty of exceptions, theological and otherwise (Erasmus and Luther on Free Will, Barth, Schillebeeckx, Gandhi, et. al.). To see a slapdash view of all of the covers in this series, click here (after quickly extracting all the ISBN’s, I whipped up a short PHP script to display all the books in the series).

I’m curious, what do you think about the covers in this series? What say you?!

Update: Anthony has alerted me to a post he wrote three years ago on the same subject, with funny and appropriate commentary worth checking out.

This is the upcoming Centre of Theology and Philosophy conference called The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism. I’ve put in a lot of work into making this conference page so let me know what you think! (special nod to Mootools for creating such a nice javascript framework!)

Also, if you’re interested in attending, we are now accepting reservations for the conference as well as paper abstracts for panels. All the information you need is on the site.