Gentle Readers,
I know it's been more than two weeks since I made any new top-level articles, but I hope to resume doing it soon. This was because: i) I got very involved arguing with people on the comment sections of my blog, with consequent fatigue, and ii) I'm in the process of having my wisdom teeth removed (3 on Monday and 1 in a few hours). I'm not in a whole lot of pain, but any encouragement is still welcome.
Nevertheless, sometime soon I hope to resume where I left off, trying to talk about general relativity in an accessible way. It's been a long time since I've had a physics post, and I'm beginning to miss them.
I'm also going to continue talking about theology, but in a somewhat less argumentative way. As St. Lewis says in Reflections on the Psalms, "A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it." So for the next little while, I'll be focussing more on explaining what I believe than why I believe it (though of course the two things are connected!). Hopefully this will also result in those posts being more accessible to ordinary readers: one of the hazards of debate is that one loses track of any audience besides the people one is arguing with.
So in a few days, Lord willing, I will return to this endeavor with more wisdom, if fewer teeth. May those still reading this blog be blessed, may those who have given up on it be blessed, and may those who never started reading it also be blessed. Amen.
General relativity is cool. By all means let's have more of it!
Incidentally, I find some of your saintings odd for one reason only -- you often use the construction "St. [surname]", which feels wrong to me. Surely it should be St Clive not St Lewis, St Gilbert not St Chesterton, etc.? If you're concerned that no one will know who St Clive is, it could be St Clive Lewis or even St C S Lewis. Or (just as one has St Francis of Assisi and St Teresa of Avila) St Clive of Oxford, or of Cambridge, or of Belfast. In any case, surely what comes after "St" should be an actual name such as one might call the person by.
Best of luck with your recovery from tooth removal.
g,
Thanks for your well-wishes.
I know that my current convention differs from the usual protocol for saying saint names. (Not that this is the only eccentric thing about it.) My reason for doing things this way, for whatever it's worth, is that I want to present the name in the simplest way likely to be recognizable to the casual reader, who may already be confused by the existence of the St. prefix on an unexpected personage. In cases like Lewis and Chesterton, I judge that they're sufficiently well known by their surname that this will do. In other cases I use first name or full name. I'm not aiming at consistency, but just to be understood in each case.
By the way, apparently no one called Clive "Clive"--he hated that name and was "Jack" to all his friends. But St. Jack would probably be even more confusing.
If I were an artist I could just insert a little stained glass window jpeg in each post showing them with symbolic objects that give clues as to their identity. But you'll be waiting a long time before I start that blog convention...
Yeah, St Jack might be better for CSL in some sense, but no one would have the slightest idea who you meant. (Incidentally, if you happen not to know the history behind that nickname, it's quite interesting. Though I suspect that really he mostly didn't like "Clive" very much. And he could hardly have used his middle name instead. "Hi. Please call me Staples.")