Immanuel Kant

In his Critique of Pure Reason he claims that “‘Being’ is evidently not a real predicate,” by which he means that existence is not a property or a feature of a thing. ... And if existence is not a property or feature of things, Anselm’s argument fails: a perfect being has all the perfections, including the properties of being all-good and all-knowing, but not including the property of existing, simply because there is no such property. --Alex Byrne, God: Philosophers weigh in, Boston Review, January/February 2009 (via Arts & Letters Daily)


--James DiGiovanna and Carey Burtt, Kant Attack Ad, YouTube, December 8, 2007

Sapere Aude!, by Anja Steinbauer, Philosophy Now, January/February 2005

History, Reason and Hope: A Comparative Study of Kant, Hayek and Habermas, by Richard B. Day, Humanitas, 2002 No. 2

The discarded Lemon: Kant, prostitution and respect for persons, by Timothy J. Madigan, Philosophy Now, Summer/Autumn 1998

Burke, Kant and the Sublime, by Gur Hirshberg, Philosophy Now, Winter 1994/1995

State agency's new logo has an anarchist ring to it

The state agency, Patrick Marley reports in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, is the Government Accountability Board and it's new logo reminds some of the symbol for Anarchy.

The board paid about $4,900 to have the logo designed by Madison-based Cricket Design Works, said Kevin Kennedy, the board's director.

"About" meaning close enough for government work?

He said he first became aware of the similarity when a board employee mentioned it as they reviewed drafts of the design.

"I think there are significant differences" between the designs, Kennedy said.

Different enough for government work?

Farsightedness

Archbishop Weakland's memoirs (p. 67) include this from his days as a student in Rome (1948-1951).

I was surprised in later years to see how readily some in the Church labeled others heretics...

Indeed.

Karl Popper

Popper "shows" [in The Open Society and Its Enemies] that he is smarter and more open-minded than Plato or Hegel. That kind of thinking is one of the main obstacles to open-mindedness in our time. --The Intercollegiate Review, The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century, Fall 1999

Leningrad Cowboys, with the Red Army Choir, "Sweet Home Alabama"

(via Joseph Bottum at First Thoughts)

Robert Penn Warren

If political messianism was one disturbing cultural undercurrent of the 2008 presidential election cycle, faux populism was another. Faux populism is a perennial American political temptation, most brilliantly captured by Robert Penn Warren’s classic novel All the King’s Men. --George Weigel, A Campaign of Narratives, First Things, March 2009

Printer's devil

Archbishop Weakland's memoirs on his time as Abbot Primate of the Benedictines, 1973-1976, include (p. 199)

I ceased to be judgmental; I stopped categorizing people as good or evil.

Archbishop Weakland in an August 31, 1998 letter to Paul Likoudis, News Editor of The Wanderer

...although I have promised myself I would not demonize those who disagree with me, I believe you come as close to being a truly evil person as I expect to meet in my lifetime.

Salvador Dali

both his work and life could mean anything and everything, and that there is always a more astonishing story around the corner. --Robert Colvile, The Telegraph, February 17, 2009, review of Dali and I: Exposing the Dark Circus of the International Art Market, by Stan Lauryssens (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Homage to Catalonia, by Robert Hughes, Guardian, March 13, 2004

Rationing

Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he'd get it and you wouldn't, it's rationing. --Michael Kinsley (via KausFiles)

Lukewarm about the parish school

In the March 2009 school newsletter, principal Judi Kelley said "Despite the many rumors out there, St. Luke School is open next year". The school committee said, in bold print, "St. Luke School has committed that our school will be open for the 2009-10 school year". In a March 25, 2009 letter, the pastor, Father Kenneth Augustine, announced the school would be closing.

When asked about the parents' concern that there was a lack of communication, Lodes [David Lodes, superintendent of the archdiocesan schools office] said Fr. Augustine held all the required meetings.

Therese Nitka, president of the St. Luke home and school committee, raised the issue of lack of communication in a letter to the parish's Faith in Our Future campaign leaders. That Archdiocesan capital campaign's mission is "To strengthen Catholic education and faith formation for the future of the Church." The article doesn't quote anyone from the parish or archdiocese on what to make of this school closing in the midst of that campaign.

The newsletter message from the school committee had said that school endowment funds were supplementing the parish subsidy for the school. The school endowment will presumably now be applied to other purposes, a sore point to a commenter to this earlier post.

[Enrollment down, costs up; St. Luke School closes,
by Tracy Rusch, Milwaukee Catholic Herald, June 25, 2009]

Bertrand Russell

Logicism posits that the vast edifice of mathematics is nothing but a working out of logic, of the rules of reasoning. This was Bertrand Russell’s view, famously worked out with Alfred North Whitehead in Principia Mathematica. Most mathematicians and most philosophers of mathematics found the book unreadable and the argument unpersuasive. --Fernando Q. Gouvea, The Book of Numbers, First Things, February 2009, review of Is God a Mathematician? by Mario Livio

Earth to Russell: the limits of Russell's views on space exploration, by Chad Trainer, Philosophy Now, March/April 2003

Bertrand Russell: Prophet of the New World Order, by David J. Peterson, New Oxford Review, June 2000

Love, logic & unbearable pity: The private Bertrand Russell, by Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, September 1992

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950

Old Nick...otine

“the smoke of Satan has entered the Church” --Pope Paul VI, Mass on the 9th anniversary of the crowning of His Holiness Paul VI on the Solemnity of the Apostles Peter and Paul, June 29, 1972 (via Adoremus Bulletin)

Reading Rat Vol. 3 No. 18

New and updated posts on my recommended reading...


Art and Literature

Geoffrey Wolff on John Cheever

Time on Rainer Maria Rilke

Noel Murray on John Updike

Carlin Romano on Flannery O'Connor

Joel Brouwer on Charles Wright

Stephen Pastis on interpreting William Faulkner

D. H. Tracy on Randall Jarrell

Michael Dirda on the life of Graham Greene


Society and History

Gertrude Himmelfarb on Edmund Burke

Michael Ross on Mortimer J. Adler

The Economist on Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes


Science and Technology

Adam Gopnik on Charles Darwin


Philosophy and Religion

Gary A. Anderson on Martin Luther

Alex Byrne on Anselm

Pankaj Mishra on The Vedas


On the recommended reading list itself, I've continued adding comments from The Harvard guide to influential books: 113 distinguished Harvard professors discuss the books that have helped to shape their thinking (1986), edited by C. Maury Devine, Kim D. Parrish, and Claudia Dissell

Charles Wright

These accounts of language as simultaneously a fond illusion and our only hope for a stable place to stake a claim on reality pose the problem Wright wisely resists pretending poetry can solve. --Joel Brouwer, Poetry Chronicle, The New York Times, April 24, 2009, review of Sestets, by Charles Wright

A scale model replica

Thomas J. Reese, S.J., finds fault with the approach of the U.S. Bishops to implementing revisions to the liturgy.

Market testing, beta sites, learning from experience and listening to the people are not part of the hierarchy's lexicon. "We know what's best. Full speed ahead!"

If that critique applies to mere revisions of the post-conciliar liturgy, it applies with much more force to the decision to implement it in the first place. Archbishop Weakland recalls, in his memoirs, the evenings of January 11, 12, and 13, 1968, when Pope Paul VI had three versions of the proposed new form of liturgy celebrated in the Capella Matilde at the Vatican.

Since the idea was to replicate a parish Sunday Mass, he asked that a small congregation be present and for each evening invited about twenty-five people. I was among them. ... On the last night, the pope, in the chapel, thanked all of those who came, stressed that this was an "historic moment", and begged for feedback. Each evening after the Mass, Pope Paul invited a small group, five to seven of us, to discuss our reactions; I attended all three evenings. (A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, p. 205)

Archbishop Weakland has elsewhere called these three evenings test marketing the revised liturgy. Unless Father Reese wants to take issue with the 1968 procedure, the U.S. Bishops need only have a couple dozen of their number attend one Mass with the latest revisions to meet his objections.

(via Diogenes at Off the Record)

William Faulkner

--Stephen Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, May 8, 2009


William Faulkner: 'Not an Educated Man', by Jay Parini, Chronicle Review, November 26, 2004

The Ding-Dong of Doom, review by Christopher Benfey of One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, by Jay Parini, New Republic, November 5, 2004

William Faulkner on Horseback, by Javier Marías, Threepenny Review, Spring 2004

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949

Anselm

...the crucial step in Anselm’s argument is this: if (b) is true, and no perfect being exists, then (a) must be false—the Fool [of Psalm 14] is not thinking of a perfect being, because a perfect being has, among its other perfect-making properties or features, existence. Put the other way round: if (a) is true—if the Fool is genuinely thinking of a perfect being—then (b) must be false, and so God, the perfect being, exists. --Alex Byrne, God: Philosophers weigh in, Boston Review, January/February 2009 (via Arts & Letters Daily)

Window-dressing

You're only as good as your last envelope.
--Silvio Dante with advice to the laity

The U.S. Bishops work drafting a pastoral letter on the U.S. economy in the 1980s lead to the formation of "The Lay Commission" to write from a different perspective. Archbishop Rembert Weakland now recalls in his just-published memoirs,

In mid-July [1984] a few members, including [William] Simon and [Michael] Novak, flew into Milwaukee to meet personally with me to assure me that their document was to be seen as a contribution to our [Bishops'] committee's work. I could not object to this initiative since it represented the kind of dialogue we bishops had hoped for. (A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, p. 281)

He didn't describe it as the kind of meeting most people hope for in Paul Wilkes' 1992 book profiling him.

"I looked out the window," the Archbishop said, remembering the day that the group of neo-conservative Catholics was scheduled to arrive, "and up pulled these limousines with smoked windows, having whisked the occupants from their private planes, which had landed minutes before at the Milwaukee Airport. All I could think of was it looked very much like a meeting of high level Mafia leaders." (The Education of an Archbishop, p. 39)

In the ensuing "dialogue" he "listened patiently" to his visitors; his response included that "Vatican II clearly restated that the free-market economy is not the be-all and end-all." Somehow I doubt his visitors were making such a claim.

The Vedas

In fact, most Indians in the 18th century knew no Sanskrit, the language exclusive to Brahmins. For centuries, they remained unaware of the hymns of the four Vedas or the idealist monism of the Upanishads that the German Romantics, American Transcendentalists and other early Indophiles solemnly supposed to be the very essence of Indian civilization. --Pankaj Mishra, Another Incarnation, The New York Times, April 24, 2009, review of The Hindus: An Alternative History, by Wendy Doniger

Randall Jarrell

Jarrell’s style came out of an early reaction against the Agrarians, who, he felt, had thrown the baby out with the bathwater in their rejection of romanticism. He was temperamentally opposed to the notion of poetry requiring professional explication. --D. H. Tracy, Choose A or B, Contemporary Poetry Review, review of Randall Jarrell and His Age, by Stephen Burt, and Randall Jarrell’s Letters: An Autobiographical and Literary Selection, edited by Mary Jarrell

'Death of a Ball Turret Gunner', the poem most familiar to readers of anthologies, is couched in considerable explanation. Given the compression of the poem itself (five lines long), Jarrell's commentary dwarfs it. ... Most readers would not have known, for instance, that the ball turret gunner on an American bomber was often positioned like a fetus in the womb or that at high altitude blood would instantly freeze to the fur-lined jacket. --Ernest Hilbert, Author essay, Bold Type, May, 2002

Women's Auxiliary

Talkin' 'bout your troubles an ya
ya never learn
Ride a painted pony,
Let the spinnin' wheel turn.
--David Clayton-Thomas

Archbishop Weakland's memoirs join the ongoing effort to rewrite the history of how Auxiliary Bishop Sklba was ordained a bishop in 1979. The Vatican had canceled his scheduled ordination because of what he had written on women's ordination. Archbishop Weakland and then-Father Sklba flew to Rome to try to get this decision reversed. They were denied a meeting with Pope John Paul II. In Paul Wilkes 1992 book The Education of an Archbishop, Archbishop Weakland gave this account of what happened next.

"Cardinal Casaroli, [Pope John Paul II's] secretary of state ... asked us to draft some sort of statement, acceptable to the Pope, that would in essence have Sklba back down from his position. We drafted something -- not a backing down but an attempt to put Sklba's statement in the context of church teaching -- and the word came back that the Pope said no. We drafted another statement and waited. Dick was to be consecrated on a Wednesday. ... Finally, late Saturday night, we got word that the Pope had approved, but with the stipulation that the statement appear in the Milwaukee papers on Tuesday, the day before Sklba's consecration. Well, the papers not only didn't play the statement as Sklba backing down but gave it the angle that he stood behind what he had originally written. We sent the articles on to Rome, but, fortunately, it being the pre-fax era, they didn't arrive in time for Rome to respond. So, while Sklba's career was certainly stalemated right off the bat, he was consecrated a bishop." (p. 59)

Something must have happened subsequently that forced the realization that this might not fit the legacy Archbishop Weakland and Bishop Sklba wanted. One might, for example, read this account and wonder if there was anything either of them wouldn't have done to get Sklba ordained a bishop, and what might have motivated that apparent desperation.

Here's Archbishop Weakland's revised version from A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, p. 247.

Several times Sklba was required to write up his position on the ordination of women, each draft of which was taken to the pope by Cardinal Casaroli. The pope kept rejecting these versions until late Saturday night when he finally gave in.

It wasn't Sklba backing down and the newspapers getting this wrong. On second thought, what really happened is Weakland and Sklba won a battle of wills with Karol Wojtyla.

Graham Greene

...Greene simply isn't all that good a letter-writer. In the novels his prose has always been somewhat drab, befitting his often doleful subject matter, but that plainness can be readily overlooked because of the cinematic vividness of his scene-setting and the lived intensity of his characters. --Michael Dirda, The Man Within, The Weekly Standard, May 4, 2009, review of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, edited by Richard Greene (via Arts & Letters Daily)


Featured Authors: Graham Greene, The New York Times, October 17, 2004


The Legacy, Posted by: Diogenes - Nov. 23, 2007 8:49 AM ET USA, Off the Record

Graham Greene, uneasy Catholic, by Ian Thomson, Times, London, August 22, 2006

Essential Graham Greene, review by Ed Conroy: Norman Sherry lays bare the 'agnostic Catholic' writer, National Catholic Reporter, November 19, 2004

Graham Greene Biography, Heavy on Sex, Draws Some Outrage, review by Dinitia Smith, New York Times, November 4, 2004

Greene at 100, review by Bernard Bergonzi of The Life of Graham Greene, Volume III: 1956-1991, by Norman Sherry, and In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene, by Yvonne Cloetta, as told to Marie-Françoise Allain, translated by Euan Cameron, Commonweal, October 22, 2004

Review by George Walden of The Life of Graham Greene: volume three (1955-1991), by Norman Sherry, New Statesman, October 18, 2004

Damned Old Graham Greene, by Paul Theroux, New York Times, October 17, 2004

Sinner Take All: Graham Greene's Damned Redemption, review by Matthew Price of The Life of Graham Greene (3 vol.), by Norman Sherry BookForum, October/November 2004

Graham Greene: Greene has fallen from grace. Yet his worldliness remains a model for the practising writer, by Julian Evans, Prospect, September 2004

Short Cuts column, by Thomas Jones, London Review of Books, November 14, 2002

The (Mis)Guided Dream of Graham Greene, by Robert Royal, First Things, November 1999

Reading Rat Vol. 3 No. 17

New and updated posts on my recommended reading...


Art and Literature

Scott Walter on Flannery O'Connor

Noel Murray on J. D. Salinger

Gregg LaGambina on John Cheever

TS on John Updike

Dan Scheraga on Joyce Carol Oates

Len Krisak on James Merrill

Mario Vargas Llosa on Jorge Luis Borges

The Knitting Circle on Reinaldo Arenas


Society and History

Stefany Anne Golberg on Henry David Thoreau

Geoff Pevere on Abraham Lincoln

John B. Judis on John Maynard Keynes


Science and Technology

Geoff Pevere on Charles Darwin

David Kaiser on Richard Feynman


Philosophy and Religion

Kenneth Rexroth on The Kabbalah

Robert Louis Wilken on Saint Augustine

Kenneth Rexroth on The Gospel of Truth


On the recommended reading list itself, I've begun adding comments from The Harvard guide to influential books: 113 distinguished Harvard professors discuss the books that have helped to shape their thinking (1986), edited by C. Maury Devine, Kim D. Parrish, and Claudia Dissell

Moving parishes

St. James Church is reportedly considering relocating to a site about a mile from my home. You might recall it hopes that its current site on South 27th Street (Highway 241) is in an area of commercial development. They were hoping it might be sold for enough to cover most or all the cost of buying and building at a new location. I had thought the current real estate market might have put that plan on hold, but it looks like it might be going ahead.

Since Franklin has long been the one of the state's fastest growing communities, I've wondered why no parish was started nearer the center of town. I've heard there was a parish building site nearby that was eventually sold. The published statistics for parishes serving Franklin, including St. James, indicated they have not grown with the community. It's possible, I suppose, that St. James will look at a move as an opportunity to grow.

(via Sprawled Out)

John Maynard Keynes

Today it is John Maynard Keynes, his British contemporary, who is cited, debated and followed. Yet [Irving] Fisher laid the foundation for much of modern monetary economics; Keynes called Fisher the “great-grandparent” of his own theories on how monetary forces influenced the real economy. --The Economist, February 12, 2009, Out of Keynes's shadow: Today’s crisis has given new relevance to the ideas of another great economist of the Depression era

Keynes's theory inverted the relationship between savings and investment. Instead of the amount of savings determining the amount of investment, the amount of investment determined the amount of savings. It also inverted the relationship between consumption and savings. If the inducement to invest was determined at least partly by consumer demand, then the greater the propensity to consume rather than save, the greater the inducement to invest. Consuming, in short, was preferable to saving. --John B. Judis, A Man for All Seasons: The misunderstood John Maynard Keynes, The New Republic, February 4, 2009 (via Arts & Letters Daily)

If we're all going to be Keynesians now, there is no reason our games shouldn't reflect that. And if you think these new cards make the game more arbitrary and random than it was before, or that it's unfair to simply take from some players and give to others then you can appreciate how things really are in New Jersey. --Tom, Keynesian Monopoly! Radio Free NJ, January 5, 2009 (via Jonah Goldberg at The Corner)

The Bretton Woods system, set up with Keynes's help in 1944, was the international expression of liberal/social democratic political economy. It aimed to free foreign trade after the freeze of the 1930s, by providing an environment that reduced incentives for economic nationalism. At its heart was a system of fixed exchange rates, subject to agreed adjustment, to avoid competitive currency depreciation. --Robert Skidelsky, Where Do We Go from Here? Prospect, January 2009

For all its eloquence and impressive textual authority, for all its generous willingness to take seriously critics of Keynes whom Keynesians laughed at until little more than a decade ago, Skidelsky’s attempted rescue of Keynes’s economics founders on the single greatest practical deficiency of Keynesian policy: its blind faith in the wisdom, justice, and competence of civil servants. --David Frum, The genius of capitalism, The New Criterion, April 1994, review of John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Savior, 1920–1937 (1992), by Robert Skidelsky

Smell of Books

In case you have been missing that booky smell when you read eBooks on your Amazon Kindle – there is a solution for you – “An Aerosol E-Book Enhancer” ...

at Blog Kindle (via Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor)

A very inclusive church

Father Joseph Collova was removed from ministry by the Archdiocese of Milwaukee due to allegations of sexual abuse. Mick Trevey of WTMJ-TV reports this Accused Priest to Become Bishop in the American Apostolic Church. Asked about his new role, Father Collova said "It’s an independent church, it’s very inclusive." (via SNAP Network)

Year for Priests

Precisely to encourage priests in this striving for spiritual perfection on which, above all, the effectiveness of their ministry depends, I have decided to establish a special "Year for Priests" that will begin on 19 June and last until 19 June 2010. In fact, it is the 150th anniversary of the death of the Holy Curé d'Ars, John Mary Vianney, a true example of a pastor at the service of Christ's flock.

From the Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the members of the Congregation for the Clergy on the occasion of their Plenary Assembly, March 16, 2009.

Bishop Callahan adds Pray for our shepherds during Year for Priests

Atlas shrugged off

"When I was in Milwaukee, Rome seemed thousands of miles away" Archbishop Weakland recalls in his memoirs (p. 246).

James Merrill

When Merrill did essay a modern metaphysics of his own, the outsized Changing Light at Sandover, the result was a twentieth-century ­cosmology cobbled somewhere out of Dante, Wordsworthian visions of reincarnation, and the most exquisitely artful seance sessions ever to manifest via a Ouija board and a broken-teacup planchette. --Len Krisak, Briefly Noted, First Things, January 2009, review of Selected Poems, by James Merrill

Mutter et Magisterium

Archbishop Weakland's memoirs recount (pp. CCCXLV-CCCXLVII) how, magna non sine difficultate, he gave religiosum voluntatis et intellectus obsequium, per Lumen Gentium XXV, to Ordinatio sacerdotalis.

Obedience to the magisterium, the teaching authority in the Church, was the most difficult part of being a Catholic, but also the rock of security. I observed too many squabbles among Christian churches because there was no ultimate authority that could break through the disputes with the final word. But I acknowledge that what is for us Catholics our strongest asset, namely the hierarchical teaching authority, is also, at times, our most burdensome and most confounding belief. (p. 347)

Or, one might say, a bishop ought to keep in mind what it's like to take hierarchy when he's dishing it out.

Jorge Luis Borges

I am quite aware of how ephemeral literary assessments can be, but in Borges’ case we can quite justifiably state that he is the most important thing to ­happen to imaginative writing in the Spanish language in modern times, and one of the most memorable artists of our age. --Mario Vargas Llosa, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus, While We’re At It, The Public Square column, First Things, December 2008


On the recommended reading by this author:

Jorge Luis Borges & the plural I, by Eric Ormsby, The New Criterion, November 1999, discussing Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley, Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman, and Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger


On this author:

If you want to know about his life, take a look in the library, by Robert Hanks, The Independent, December 19, 2004, review of Borges: A Life, by Edwin Williamson

Writer on the Couch, by David Foster Wallace, The New York Times, November 7, 2004, review of Borges: A Life, by Edwin Williamson

Peg o' His Heart

Margaret O'Brien Steinfels not only wrote the Foreward to Archbishop Weakland's memoirs, in that Foreward she discloses she edited the book. Or she attempted editing it. As she says, "I am not a book editor; five thousand words is generally my outer editing limit." (p. xi) To save time, she omitted fact-checking. For example, the real-world Archbishop Weakland who threatened a libel suit against three teachers who wrote to him about Father Dennis Pecore, and the Weakland who had archdiocesan lawyers take a judgment for costs against an abuse victim whose case was dismissed, becomes

Archbishop Weakland ... conveying in some detail his own long-standing effort to resolve cases of sexual abuse of minors in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. (p. ix)

The real world Archbishop Weakland who reassigned Father William Effinger, a known offender, to a parish, becomes Weakland the helpless victim of Vatican bureaucracy.

what could ordinary bishops do with priests who had abused children and yet could not be dismissed from the clergy? (p. x)

The real world Archbishop Weakland who wrote a thirteen year old boy to ask him to forgive Father Richard Nichols while the archdiocesan communication director asked the parents not to call the police becomes Weakland contending with

local police and prosecutors [who] were often reluctant ... to bring child abuse cases to the courtroom. (p. x)

She has him giving his farewell apology "at Milwaukee's St. John's Cathedral" (p. x) rather than at the Cousins Center in St. Francis. Apparently Weakland didn't read the Foreward, either.

The Gospel of Truth

In 1945 a whole library of Gnostic books was discovered at Nag-Hammadi in Upper Egypt, thirteen volumes, forty-eight treatises, more than seven hundred pages. Unfortunately, economic and political vicissitudes have kept most of these from publication. So far only the Gnostic books which are contained also in the Akhmin Codex of Berlin, the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Thomas, have appeared. --Kenneth Rexroth, Gnosticism, introduction to a new edition of Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Gnostics (1960), by G.R.S. Mead, reprinted in Assays (1961) and World Outside the Window: Selected Essays of Kenneth Rexroth (1987)

But those who are from Valentinus, being, on the other hand, altogether reckless, while they put forth their own compositions, boast that they possess more Gospels than there really are. Indeed, they have arrived at such a pitch of audacity, as to entitle their comparatively recent writing the Gospel of Truth, though it agrees in nothing with the Gospels of the Apostles, so that they have really no Gospel which is not full of blasphemy. For if what they have published is the Gospel of truth, and yet is totally unlike those which have been handed down to us from the apostles, any who please may learn, as is shown from the Scriptures themselves, that that which has been handed down from the apostles can no longer be reckoned the Gospel of truth. --Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses, (On the Detection and Overthrow of the So-Called Gnosis, c. 180) Book III, Chapter 11, 9.

Richard Feynman

In the early days of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in the 1920s and 1930s, calculations were notoriously convoluted, the algebra often spilling over seven and eight lines just to calculate a single quantity. Worse, these nasty calculations almost always returned infinity, even when physicists asked straightforward questions. After the war, a new crop of young theoretical physicists, including Feynman, returned to QED and its problems. He decided first to try to take charge of the algebraic morass, streamlining the laborious algebraic manipulations, before worrying about the mysteries of the infinities. And so he began his doodlings in the late 1940s. --David Kaiser, Richard Feynman's Diagrams, interview by Felice Frankel, American Scientist, September-October 2003


On this author:

Review by Kelley L. Ross, of Richard Feynman, A Life in Science, by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin (1997), at The Proceedings of the Friesian School, Fourth Series