smarcorodriguez.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Ah yes, that old feeling where I'm working on a sermon but Augustine has a line that brings me near tears and I push the manuscript away, quietly thinking, "I should just read this Augustine quote"

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Coming back to Augustine after spending so much time in Daoist and Buddhist texts and it is SUCH a different approach to desire. Diametrically opposed.

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One of the reasons why I find twentieth century Chinese political thought so fascinating is that it's like the only place in world history where Greek, Hebraic/Christian (via Boehme-Hegel-Marx), Daoist, Confucian, and Buddhist ideas are all in play. ...and it's still happening.

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If I had more time, I would write an essay comparing the critique of the carceral state in Zhuāngzǐ with the famous scene in Don Quixote of the chain gang of galley slaves.

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At first glance, the Zhuangist ideal of "freely wandering about" sounds like a Winnie the Pooh type of whimsy. But as I'm progressing in Zhuāngzǐ, the background of this phrase is darkening. "Freely wandering about" is contrasted with the realities of a brutal carceral state.

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Well now this is interesting. Fraser notes in passing that ancient Confucians made money off of performing funeral rites. In other words, they had built-in financial incentive to push their emphasis on the moral importance of elaborate rites

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Ok Zhuāngzǐ has definitely broken into the top 20 books I've ever read. Up there with Augustine, Ovid, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky.

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How much cauliflower is too much cauliflower? (Asking for a friend)

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car trouble on the way home from the early morning Ash Wednesday service, had to pull over. the thought did cross my mind: Oh shit I'm in a Flannery O'Connor story

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Okay one of the MIDDLE SCHOOLERS in this Shakespeare class opened his weekly reflection paper with, "I think the argument [between Oberon and Titania] is a fight between primordial forces of nature." We underestimate the potential of teenagers.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Zhuāngzǐ's Daoist idea of the contextual nature of use and uselessness is making me reassess Mill's utilitarianism and Ellul's technological society. But also, I am starting to see how Zhuāngzǐ influenced Heidegger's philosophy of technology!

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It's time. I'm starting to poke around Zhuāngzǐ in the original Chinese. Which also means that I'm taking back up my decades-old attempt to learn Chinese...

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I have realized that memorizing passages of poetry and drama is one of my favorite things to do.

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I am coming to think that the character in world literature most like Sun Wukong (The Monkey King) might in fact be Milton's Satan. Second place contender is probably Anansi or Reynard the Fox.

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I recently met someone, and the first thing they said to me was, "You're a lot taller when you're standing than when you're sitting at the piano." And I immediately imagined I must look like this while I'm playing

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Book 5 of Zhuāngzǐ has an extended discourse on the relationship between disability and virtue. It very much goes against contemporary disability theory in North America. It is also very different from the perspective on disability in, say, the gospels in the New Testament.

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"The sage can always find space to 'wander' in 'the harmony of virtue.'" —Chris Fraser on Zhuāngzǐ

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My hot take for the morning is that Robert Alter is undeniably one of the greatest literary interpreters of the Bible, but after spending years with his translations, I've found his narrative and poetic voices to be surprisingly disengaging and needlessly opaque

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It strikes me that there is a fundamental difference between conservatism and retrieval, even though they may look similar at first.

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Okay the composition history of the Zhuāngzǐ is so fun. It's obviously unlike the modern "single" "author." But it's also unlike an oral-to-text bard tradition like Homer. It was more of a commonplace book passed around for a few centuries.

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“Without justice, what are kingdoms but bands of robbers?” Augustine, City of God, IV.4.

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I am so angry

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There are several reasons why I've cooled on Joanna Newsom in recent years, but surely one of them is how hard it is to attend to dense lyrics with four loud kids running about

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Yesterday I got irrationally excited about sneaking an allusion to Monkey King / Journey to the West into my next sermon. I don't think anyone will catch it but if someone does I will be very happy.

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Very annoyed that an app that was relatively safe and insulated for young kids to use added social media style functionality that makes it considerably less safe. Why are tech companies like this

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One of my favorite things about reading literature with enthusiastic high schoolers is that they correct my misreadings, open up new possibilities in the text, and help me solidify themes. This time reading MND, I am seeing more of how "Is/Is Not" is a pervasive theme in it.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

I am 100% sure there is a guy or team of people at Amazon whose sole job is to make Goodreads worse, but slowly, as if we wouldn't notice

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment