VictorianLady

My Horse Tutor just informed me this mornig that there is going to be a horse tournment next month. UGH!

Alright. Mabye tomorrow then! Love you Sis. yea it is. I feel like in the last few weeks all I've been diong is being laid up in bed!

Will you chat with me? on gmail

Last night I kept having a shooting pain in my right arm(the one in a sling) and by 7:00 I could barley even move my arm without crying out in pain. So my Pappa took me to the Emergency room and the Doctor took x-rays and found out that I had dislocated my shoulder! So they had to relocate it.OUCH Now I know how Peter must have felt when he dislocated his shoulder in the Battle agianst Miraz! I am home resting now.

Can you chat for a bit?

Well my right arm is really sore and I can barley move it. I hve a pretty bad bruise on my back and shoulder!

Aye up Sis,
I'm sore all over! I went out riding yesterday and my horse got spooked by a snake and bolted. I tried to hang on but I lost my grip on her rains and landed up falling off. I fell right on my shoulder and I bumped my head on a tree branch.

Can you chat for a bit with me on gmail?

Aye up Sis,
Can you chat on gmail for a bit?

Ah, the good old duffer theads. We all spend so much time catching up with the past.

Hoping your future weeks will be less busy.

I see you on a lot, but you seem awfully inactive...

My philosophy professor got his doctorate in church history, and according to him, Calvin was more of a biblical theologian than a systematic one. He would try to interpret passages in light of their context rather than try to synthesize everything. Jacob Arminius, in fact, praised Calvin highly. Calvin's admirers, however, did try to synthesize everything he taught, and they and their intellectual descendents gradually made Calvinism more Calvinistic. According to my professor, he looked for the doctrine of limited atonement (i.e. Christ only died for the elect, not for all, one of the
Five Points of Calvinism) in Calvin's writings and couldn't even find it. (My professor thinks that the explanation of another Calvinist on the subject of the atonement--that it was "efficient for some, but sufficient for all"--is much more accurate.) He argued that Calvin's approach was the right one--that the Bible is a narrative, not a series of syllogisms, and although we should use systematic theology as a tool because Jesus did, we should never let a logical system become more important than accurate interpretation of the Biblical narrative.

Yay for the finished Walden paper. May you return to sanity--or not.

What about the Irish set your professor off?

Greetings Sis,
do you have some time to chat with me on gmail?

Definitely an interesting article (and humorous ). I haven't read Chesterton's reasons for joining the Catholic Church (although he lights into Calvinism in What's Wrong with the World).

I would have to agree with Chesterton in that some Protestants do seem to put their faith in faith instead of in Christ. Or--worse--in a prayer that they prayed when they were young children, never mind that they have lived for themselves ever since. Certainly the official doctrine of Protestantism is faith in Christ, but Protestantism has developed a few heresies of its own, the whole dependence on a prayer thing being one of the most dangerous.

What was your take on the article? (And how did you find it?)

Aye up Sis,
my rash is getting worse! It's driving me crazy

Or whether the lines just made him feel good when he wrote them. From my own experience, it seems like writing various kinds of criticism (in the higher sense of the word) makes our wording and arguments dangerously attractive to us, and it's not hard to get to the place where you just write things because it makes you feel good about yourself to write them.

Interesting thought--that lack of interest in gossip could be a vice. Probably more a vice of intelligent people, but a vice just the same when the motives for it are wrong. Too bad Thoreau didn't have the chance to share his cabin with Chesterton. That would have been a riot, and Thoreau might have been knocked out of his comfortable intellectual mindset.

How goeth Walden?

Yes--absolutely read Weaver. He started out as a Southern Agrarian, but went far beyond--supposedly the South's best thinker since Calhoun. Ideas Have Consequences was his most famous work. Conservative politicians who don't know anything about what Weaver believed like to quote it. It's pretty densely written, but it's also fairly short. His Southern Essays are easier to read.

My philosophy professor quoted Chesterton again today while correcting the fallacy that we can exalt God by diminishing man. I thought he was sounding Chestertonian when he brought the subject up, and then he went and quoted Chesterton on how "man is a paradox." (Or something.) The guy has made my day twice in a week.

As for a character list:
-Arran Crow/Fannag--the main character, 17 years old, spent four years living with the People ("barbarians")
-Ronag--Arran's foster-father among the People
-Anlaida--Arran's half-sister, 19 years old, another major character
-Soldor--Arran's half-brother, 29 years old, Baron of the North
-Uliath--father of Soldor, Anlaida, and Arran, deceased Baron
-Calwen--Uliath's first wife, Arran's mother
-Vara--Uliath's second wife, mother of Soldor and Anlaida (and married sisters Retaine, Thessalim, and Mostaras)
-Kalon--Uliath's half-brother ("Second Heir"), uncle to Soldor, Anlaida, and Arran
-Nollis-Anlaida's maid
-Ulma--servant
-Clentos--captain of Soldor's guard
-Caithal--scout from Iredail who appears in the prologue, not a main character
-Corath, Belaine, Avess--siblings from Volaris province, visit while Corath works on business dealings with Soldor

aye up Toria,
How be you this fine morning?

Absolutely. Thomas Jefferson and Emerson were very much opposites. Richard M. Weaver wrote a great essay on the general topic in a book of his essays (The Southern Essays of Richard Weaver, I think), except he compared the individualism of Thoreau and that of John Randolph of Roanoke (a man more Jeffersonian than Jefferson). Weaver argued that one major difference between them was that, while Randolph's individualism had a lot to do with his community, while Thoreau's was self-interested (and partially false, since he had someone doing his laundry for him every week). As far as Emerson being a snob--definitely. He was into simplicity, but it was an affected simplicity. His New England crowd was very much into looking down on everyone and everything that did not agree with them--basically the rest of the country, including the Middle Atlantic states. Jefferson valued the common man because of his classical liberal political beliefs. Like Thoreau and Randolph, while Emerson was focused inward, on himself and his own feelings, Jefferson was focused outward, on the people around him. It's the old story of the contemplator versus the doer (although Jefferson, unlike Emerson, knew how to manage both things).

As far as "The Crow's Cry" goes, it would be simpler if I could scan a map of the countries into the computer, but I neither have nor know how to use a scanner. (Bother. I'll try to send you a paper copy. It should make things more clear. There's a reason they always put maps inside fantasy books.) What exactly was confusing you about the prologue? (I want to revise this story later, so I may do the beginning of the book differently when I do. It seems a bit confusing to me, too, and I'm the author.)

Yes, Anlaida does come into the story a lot. I think what I want to do with her character and Arran's is becoming clearer as I continue writing, so hopefully things will make more sense as you go on.