I'm a bookworm who has moved in the last 18 month from writing reviews to writing Adult Bible Studies and devotions for my church and a growing e-mail list. For copy e-mail to maroldbw@msn.com
Interests
Studying and teaching the Bible as understood through the last 2000 years, including Midrashic writings, Patristic fathers, the great reformers, and in literature.
The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis, is available in many editions, either alone or in collections of Lewis' Christian novellas and essays such as The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Problem of Pain. Like his Narnia stories for children and his Out of the Silent Planet trilogy, this is a collage of science fiction, fantasy, and theology. Even more than some of his other works I've read, it is really quite a pastiche of different ideas, some of which seem to have been thrown at the text as Jackson Pollock may have thrown paint at his canvases. For example, here and there are brief but very familiar quotes from the Bible which seem to pop up to fill in some space in a… Read more
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, translated by J. A. K. Thomson (London, Penguin Classics, 2003) or
Aristotle XIX, Nichomachean Ethics, translated by H. Rackham (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1934)
I offer references to both a very modern, inexpensive, easily available edition, and to a scholarly edition with Greek and the English translation on facing pages. This is a testament to the importance of this ancient work. Among Greco-Roman philosophy, it is probably in the same league as Plato's Republic, since they arrive at the same main conclusion, albeit from very different routes.
After I left the study of professional philosophy and… Read more
André Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, translated by Catherine Temerson (New York, Holt Paperbacks, 2001)
The short of it is that this book will make you feel good about being good.
The long of it is:
I was doing a paper on `value ethics', and my experience was that in the world of professional philosophy, especially since 1903, with the publishing of G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica and his promulgation of the `naturalistic fallacy', the consideration of values and character had virtually disappeared. This general impression was confirmed when I looked at a few scholarly ethics texts from the 1960's and they confirmed in plain… Read more
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