Vandal With a Handle

I was never a big Rodney Dangerfield fan, but you had to be living in a deep hole to escape "I get no respect!" in the 70's. Joseph Sobran has a touching memorial to the man and a few good thoughts on the blessing of humor itself. Example:

Psychoanalysts tell us that humor is a form of aggression. My own view is that psychoanalysis is a form of aggression for humorless people.

How would you like to read Theologica Germanica, the little treatise that Luther said taught him more than any book but the Bible and Augustine? How about Law's Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life? Would you like to hear the New Testament read in the original koine'? All of this and more is possible on the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The site appears to be connected to Calvin College, a liberal arts college associated with the Christian Reformed Church. Most of the material is available for free download but some items are for sale. The Bible itself is available in several languages, as well as the writings of the Church Fathers. Much of the material is available for both pc and PalmPilot and in MP3 form for audio use. For anyone needing (or wanting) access to a broad selection of historical Christian material, this site is certainly a logical place to start.

Another TechCentralStation link to an article on the impact of the new media on the old. It begins:

Buoyed by the ascendancy of a new information technology, a revolution against the mainstream media (MSM) is underway. What began as a modest effort to reform the excesses of the MSM evolves into a total rejection of the MSM's right to mediate and interpret the truth. Bewildered by its huge loss of prestige, and embarrassed by its increasingly obvious shortcomings, the MSM alternately dismisses the revolution and lashes out against it. Slowly but inevitably, a new understanding emerges. Lay people realize that they have both the ability and the duty to find the truth on their own, free from the biases of a corrupt and self-serving institution. As the unrivalled authority of the MSM has collapsed, the MSM must curb its excesses and return to its primitive purity -- or collapse under the weight of its arrogance.


We're talking about 2004, the Internet, the blogosphere, and the big news reporting agencies, right?



Wrong. We're talking about the sixteenth century, the printing press, the first Protestants, and the Roman Catholic Church.

Partisan perspective notwithstanding, this is a splendid expression of the American vision of the rights of man. Short, complete, to the point.

Fred has hit a home run on the benefits of education and the desolation following its decline and fall. A sample:

We become bushmen and do not know it. And it is getting late. Afternoon comes. Twenty years ago the observant wrote that those of the rising generation of the time were the first in America to be less schooled than their parents. Those students are now in midlife and have their own intellectually bedraggled children, the second generation of complacently unwashed.

What a tragedy that the joys of learning become alien to whole generations.