Interview (Youtube) with Eric Metaxas.
Contains a nugget about how Lewis got the idea to write the Screwtape Letters. (Hint: Something to do with Hitler.)
And then this exchange: “Who in the 20th century comes close to Tolkien and Lewis when writing about the nature of evil?” “Maybe Orwell.”
I’d never heard of this artist (Briton Rivière) before, I’ve never seen this picture before (Daniel in the Lions’ Den).
There’s a video about it titled: ‘This Painting Is an Absolute Masterpiece’
It really is brilliant!
Interesting that it was particularly popular in Victorian times.
8-minute video here.
5 minute animated video by the Bible Project.
Jordan Peterson interprets the Grimm’s fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. (53 minute video.)
Presentation by Jordan Peterson.
From the video description:
Dr. Jordan Peterson offers a psychological and cultural analysis of the Grimm Brothers’ Snow White, using it as a lens to explore evolutionary biology, female status hierarchies, fertility suppression, and the pathology of the “evil queen” archetype. Drawing on research in primatology and cultural commentary, Peterson connects ancient folklore to modern dynamics—critiquing contemporary feminist ideologies, careerism, and generational envy, while upholding the redemptive power of masculine responsibility in narrative tradition (and real life). Part myth, part science, part cultural autopsy—this is the synthesis of one of Peterson’s most impactful tenants: stories matter, and fundamental stories reiterate across time.
10 Reasons Why You Should Read The Iliad This Summer
Article by Joanna Williams.
Excerpt:
Paddington is, we are told, a representative of diverse Britishness. But this is bizarre. Unable to name real historical heroes, including the many Brits of migrant backgrounds who have made their mark, the cultural elites resort to celebrating a fictional character. It’s as if these people are unable to make the case either for British values or mass migration and so hide behind poor old Paddington.
Perhaps the very attraction of Paddington as a national symbol over, say, Shakespeare or Churchill, rests on the fact that he is made up. Real people exist within a particular time period and tend to reflect that era’s values. Real people often have messy personal lives – few of us are unambiguously good or bad. But moral purity and all manner of values can be ascribed to fictional bears. They never disappoint.
9 minute video here.
He ends by saying nothing in Beethoven’s music is remarkable – except ‘the form’, meaning that every note is exactly right, ‘as if he’d had a direct line to heaven, to God.’
Article by Ira Katz.
Excerpt:
In the counter cultural era that I grew up in, listening to classical music could be considered to be the real counter cultural expression. But this was not my intent at all. I was more like the naive child who noticed the emperor’s new clothes were nothing compared to those old clothes.
Jordan Peterson interviews Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying.
Stuff about “narratives” starts at about 40 minutes in.
Content:
(0:35) Intro (3:36) Bret and Heather at Peterson Academy (6:19) The social media approach to learning: iterative feedback (12:01) Combating the evolution of corruption (17:37) The benefits of recorded lectures, future goals for in-person conventions (20:27) Cost of entry, managing bad actors, and the hierarchy of curation (26:04) Why Hillsdale College has a 1% dropout rate in the first year (30:36) The difference between censorship and refereeing, leveraging evolution to continuously self-improve (32:58) Elon Musk: adapting solutions faster than those who seek to game the system (34:45) The orthodoxy of the past and predicting the future (36:21) Rescue the Republic – “We’re hoping this will be an event the way Woodstock was a music festival” (40:02) The propositional must be surrounded by the imagistic, the opportunity for discovery (42:14) Propositional intelligence — and what actually makes you wise (45:57) The edge traversed by comedians, the advent of the laugh track (53:03) The radical distortion of music, “music used to be a living entity” (57:35) Putting forth the pillars of our civilization, the exhausted middle (1:00:14) A secular thinker on the spiritual battle we are all engaged in (1:04:11) The necessity of narrative, translating for the secular (1:09:49) The title toward the demonic, using AI to map the pattern of the Logos (1:11:16) Prayer, revelation, and the spirit of the question (1:14:25) Brick-in-the-wall science, hypothesis generation (1:17:59) The relation between openness and divergent associations, hierarchies of mutational repair (1:20:49) A new convergence on a shared perspective, the need of God to answer prayers (1:22:50) Richard Dawkins, winning with your own audience rather than making substantive progress (1:27:41) What the ancients knew about the delusion of being, metaphorical models in science (1:34:40) Dawkins’ one error in “The Selfish Gene”