"(Year of Plenty) is a story honestly and modestly told—no apocalytptic ranting, no preaching, no pontificating. And very much a story--the detailed account, with insight and humor, of a suburban family with two pre-teenage daughters negotiating a way of life through the maze of American consumerism.
Albert Borgmann writes convincingly of the necessity, if we are not going to be ruined by living second-hand in a consumerist culture, of developing what he calls "focal practices"--practices that keep our lives attentive and present and participating in what is immediate and personal. Craig and Nancy Goodwin with their daughters are providing the rest of us with an unpretentious witness to just what is involved in focal practices.
The embracing context for this story as it is told here is the Word that became flesh, moved into our neighborhood—think of it, our very backyards!-- and revealed God to us. Care of creation (environmentalism) is fundamentally about this incarnation, the core doctrine of the Christian faith, God with us in the Jesus of history....
Year of Plenty is...a convincing witness to the sanctity of the everyday, the ordinary, the things we eat and clothes we wear, the names of our neighbors and the money we spend, which is to say, Jesus in our neighborhood.
Alright, now for that box in a box. Time to talk to Myles.
PS: I discovered (or at least semi-think a light bulb went on) yesterday what's been driving me mad at work. I narrowed it down to something I didn't know the name for. I said to myself, "This is the key. I can go on working now and just know that that is what it is. It's so simple maybe they don't even know about it. Something that maps to itself." Inadvertently, I ran into it yesterday. It's called "invariance". It's a completely simple thing, but proves to be fundamental (I am pretty sure). The "more advanced" part of this link is where I was all over. I even gave a lame attempt at explaining something to Larry about this. I told him, "I am thinking wrong." I'm not saying I get this, but see here, there's a quote, "This suggests what is in fact a profound theoretical insight as it shows that special relativity is simply a rotational symmetry of our space-time, very similar to rotational symmetry of Euclidean Space... SR can be stated in terms of the invariance of space-time interval (between any two events) as seen from any inertial reference frame." I think I need to understand tensors.
PPS: I can't tell you how confused I've been... like everything moving as I'm trying to think about it.
You often think that you are losing your ability to figure problems out, and invariably, the problem is just plain HARD. You always solve it in the end. But perhaps the process takes too great a toll upon you. :-(
ReplyDeleteI cannot wait to read Craig's book. Maybe we will get some ideas...
Invariably. I get it. You are funny.
ReplyDeleteI was just talking to my advisor about invariance yesterday: what makes two differently shaped objects on the surface of Mars craters? There has to be some kind of invariant that form the basis for what we call a crater. But what are these invariants? I dunno (yet).
ReplyDeleteInstead of the name "Special Relativity", I wonder if the world would be different if they would have called it "Special Invariance".
ReplyDeleteInstead of people saying "it's all relative" they'd be saying "it's all invariant." I like that.
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