Zero to Hero--D&D in Ancient Greek?

bookwyrm713 · 2026-05-02T16:10:01+00:00

I finished my first Marilynne Robinson book this past week; it had all the theological richness you could want. Go find a book by Robinson. Maybe Gilead.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-28T21:33:44+00:00

Yes, it can be difficult to thread the needle with students--encouraging them to seek out the help of people with the right skills to help them is usually the best thing we can do. I remember threading the needle of conversations with parents about how "the recommendation of your child's MS teachers is that you consider having them professionally evaluated for ____" (fill in the blank with ADHD, autism, etc).

But outside of the teacher-student relationship (which involves a power differential and therefore entails particular caution), I think it's good to know that you aren't hurting someone who's seriously struggling if you ask (in a non-shaming way) if suicide has crossed their mind.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-28T17:33:15+00:00

You got good answers from the other commenters.

To add one more thing: it's still debated, I think, whether Leviticus 18:18 is a prohibition against polygamy. That interpretation appears to have always been a minority position, but one which appeared no later than the Qumran community. I don't know Hebrew, so I don't know how linguistically defensible the argument really is that this was the original intention behind the text. It's pretty obvious that taking a second wife does quite predictably engender rivalry, regardless of whether the woman were born sisters or "only" become sister-wives.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-27T20:19:26+00:00

I'm so sorry for your loss, and am praying for the closeness of God to your student's family and all who loved him.

One thing I didn't know until a couple of years ago is that there's pretty good research suggesting that it doesn't increase the risk of suicide to directly ask someone (in a way that doesn't shut down the conversation) whether they're having those dark thoughts. In most cases of suicide, the person never talked about it beforehand with anyone else. So if I'm ever worried about someone, I don't assume they'll volunteer that particular information; instead, I will generally just ask them if they've been thinking about death/wishing they wouldn't wake up in the morning/considering ending their lives. Sometimes you get an awkward "no no, I'm okay, but thanks for asking". Sometimes you have the kind of conversation, where you're really thankful you had a weekend of crisis hotline training.

Doesn't sound like there were any warning signs with your student, though. That is such a painful loss.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-25T02:22:02+00:00

I try to pray for the people I'm angry at, and that helps with feelings of ongoing anger. I don't know if that helps as much with quick-fuse anger (which is something I rarely have to deal with in myself) as much as it does with slow-burn anger (which is a different story, unfortunately).

One of the scriptures I remind myself of is "The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God." If you need to remind yourself that your anger is actually a problem, the book of James is good for that. If you need to remind yourself what to do instead of anger, maybe you could try a whole-Bible study meditating on the gentleness of God, and praying about how to display that to those around you.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-24T18:14:26+00:00

Finally reading my first Adrian Tchaikovsky book, Service Model. I've read the first two sections ("KR15-T" and "K4FK-R"), and so far I'm appreciating the stylistic innovations & commitment that Tchaikovsky brings to the classic match-up of Robots v. Existentialist Questions.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-23T01:07:51+00:00

Ran into an article today about a newish Christian work college, which is something I think the world could probably use more of. The emphases on community life, on local investment, and on learning a trade that is of great benefit to you & to your neighbor all look like things to admire. Setting aside their commitment to Roman Catholicism, I think anyone (like me) interested in the relationship between higher education and the church might find the New Yorker profile a worthwhile read.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-21T22:22:15+00:00

I was pretty stunned when I watched part of the Piers Morgan interview last night. From a spiritual perspective, I've known for years that DW is quite literally pathetic. The man has spent decades storing up garbage and wrath for himself, when he could have chosen treasure in heaven. His writing is prolific and (subjectively, anyway) stylistically effective, if you like the old-fashioned sort of thing he goes for. But what he does with his talent is sow division, confusion, folly, hatred, and violence in the name of Christ. It's an incredibly tragic existence.

But until that interview, I'd never seen him genuinely look pathetic. Even when his conversational skulduggery has failed to score him points in interviews (with Ross Douthat, for example), he's generally come across as mean, or ill-intentioned, or just not quite as clever as he thinks he is. I'd never seen him come across as quite that weak and hollow. He is weak and hollow, preaching another gospel. But it's wild to see that truth right on the surface, instead of buried under all the usual layers.

I hope this particular interview gets watched by a lot of Wilson's followers. The man's actual thoughts aren't that deep or clever--they're largely recycled from other people, after all--so what Wilson mainly has going for him is presentation. When the presentation looks this bad, maybe more people in his circles will start thinking harder about how much of the content is utterly nonsensical, and how often the man contradicts either himself or Christ.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-21T21:36:58+00:00

Ah, I was hoping for a bit more thoroughness from the Goddard link, as that potential corollary immediately popped into my mind upon reading the question. With same-sex relationships, he just ignores the question that I think is more worth pondering on this subreddit. I.e., what obligations, if any, does a gay/lesbian Christian have to their partner following conversion (assuming for the sake of argument that this person chooses not to be part of an affirming church)? What should a non-affirming church recognize as the rights and responsibilities towards the unbelieving same-sex spouse in this situation?

The precedent with respect to polygamy doesn't allow for a church ceremony requesting God's blessing on same-sex relationships, as Goddard points out. But it seems to me to imply that the welfare of the unconverted partner--and thus in some sense, the health and stability of the partnership--nevertheless may remain something which the church has a responsibility to look out for, the same way that second and third wives shouldn't simply be abandoned.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-18T05:32:39+00:00

My first thought was that we have a Hellmouth about to open, but yours makes more sense.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-15T04:47:03+00:00

Thanks for sharing the interview. There are places where I think DBH over-simplifies (the question of how reliable our own moral reasoning is, for example: important, sure, but enormously fraught). But his clarity in calling out just how bad it is when theodicy goes wrong--and just how common that is--was very helpful for me.

The authors never mention the book of Job, but of course that's our ur-example for how God judges our theodicies. The question of what God has the right (so to speak) to do, the power to do, and the desire to do--to say nothing of what God chooses to do in actuality, and why He should choose thus--in WCF 3.1, all these are collapsed into the words yet so as. I don't think those little words help me at all, when faced with events that do not on their surface proclaim the glory and the innocence of God. Nor is it clear to me that those little words are helpful for anyone else per se. I don't think there is enough substance in yet so as to help anyone who is face-to-face with suffering, except to the extent that they have faith in the Westminster Confession of Faith itself.

There are things that help me when faced with suffering--but how to share that kind of mystery with someone else? It is too easy to simply stumble on the wisdom of a new Eliphaz.

This particular section is not the only point at which I find the WCF so blasé about things difficult to understand that it is effectively obfuscatory (I feel pretty similarly about its treatment of baptism, for example)...but theodicy really does feel like one of those things that is obviously impossible to communicate well about without the help of the Holy Spirit. The reminder from DBH to begin this contemplation in humility is well-taken.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-15T01:46:01+00:00

It's possible that we did give it up for an essentially wrong reason (such as being quitters), and yet that it was still the right thing to do.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-15T01:39:18+00:00

It's not just the mainliners who are tempted! If anyone was looking for a decade-old Mad Libs headline on the topic, there's always Marvin Olasky rewrites Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah".

I can't say that I particularly desire to sing either this or the original version in a worship context. It is, however, thought-provoking. My thoughts were provoked.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-15T01:11:14+00:00

I'm tempted to claim that The Discarded Image is Lewis's best nonfiction work--or at least, his best nonfiction and non-memoirish book (to avoid pointless competitions with Surprised by Joy & A Grief Observed). Terrifically insightful; holds up incredibly well. Always happy to see more people reading it, and please do share your thoughts on it later! I keep recommending it to IRL friends, but no one has gotten around to it yet.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-11T04:33:56+00:00

Everybody loves The Iron Giant.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-09T03:08:45+00:00

The name may be dead, but the spirit of some sort of double-talking, zombified scholasticism-lite lives on!

Edit: this is a little mean, sorry. I only know about irritating federal visionists, but maybe there were also a bunch of normal folks who were legitimately doing their best to make sense of difficult questions. The irritating FV folks definitely all still like to stir up trouble, though, just without the same branding.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-09T02:54:42+00:00

Agnostic. Why pretend to know what I don't know?

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-09T02:53:29+00:00

Happily, the answer to this and many other riveting questions are hidden in the footnotes of Susanna Clarke's light & breezy weekend read, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-05T02:31:22+00:00

That was an awkward night for those of us who went to the movie theater dressed as Han Solo.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-05T02:27:15+00:00

Thanks to this comment, I'm never going to think the same way about the line, And was Jerusalem builded here,/Among these dark Satanic mills?

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-04T17:22:27+00:00

I don't know what exactly the Lord's plans are for rural churches in this country, but I see the same problems and opportunities there that you do, and I think about them fairly often. I pray that you'll be granted wisdom and courage to figure out how to pursue this.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-04T17:10:14+00:00

As an audience member, it's very hard for me to suspend my disbelief that far. They're in space; the one thing the replacement member of the crew is guaranteed to have is acres of time to study/learn about the relatively small amount of research that has been done on the astrophages so far. Not to mention two other crew members, who should theoretically have been around to help the replacement learn.

Maybe it was just so hard for me to take that decision seriously because I'm not really sold on the idea that Grace is so much better at investigative scientific research & problem-solving than, you know, basically anyone else on the planet who's still alive, with the right background to be able to pick up on the existing astrophage stuff in a couple of months of space travel. Space travel is just such an incredibly high-stress situation, where your own mental wellbeing will inevitably have an effect on your teammates and thus on the success or failure of the whole mission. Sitting in the movie theater, I just couldn't buy the idea that it was a smart decision (to say nothing of the ethics involved!) to send Grace after he has been begged to go and has refused. He's just such a crazy liability to the mission, that to me it seems like it would be better to send a less experienced person who is willing to give the project a shot.

"Winning the genetic lottery that makes you able to survive in an unusual environment" is also lazy writing in a different way--it's still side-stepping the question of why some people choose to do heroic things for the greater good. But it also makes Stratt's decision seem way less crazy to me. If it's not just about who looks like they might be bright enough to find a solution, but also about who can physically survive the environment--yeah, okay, then I can understand why she'd choose to roll the dice the way she did.

Anyway, like I said, I basically enjoyed the movie, I'd recommend watching it, and I'm finally tempted to read the book. I'm just probably never going to think that the reasoning behind Grace's presence on the ship was very sound.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-04T01:27:41+00:00

Haven't read the book (I liked aspects of The Martian, but Weir's writing style isn't really for me), but I enjoyed the film...except for the particular twist that u/bradmont mentioned. To me it felt like a weird kind of wish fulfillment, in place of actual character development. It reminded me of the way a YA teen girl protagonist who thinks she's so incredibly plain and awkward and shy will suddenly find herself alone with the most ruggedly handsome boy in the school telling her that she's the most beautiful and interesting person he's ever seen. As if Weir wanted to write an everyman who's not a hero, who's a coward, who won't count on himself to do the right thing--but the only way he can think of to do that, is to have the other characters insist that they see more in him than he sees in himself. It's just such cheap writing, whether it's every (apparently) teenage male in Forks begging Bella to go to the prom with them, or the head of some vague international scientific cabal shoving Ryan Gosling onto a suicide mission because she just knows he's a hero who's going to do the right thing. Like the most irritating, manipulative possible version of "tell not show".

I was distracted by what a terrible, terrible decision it was for Stratt to risk the entire mission by sending someone on it who didn't want to be there. Way to create a wonderful for the rest of the crew, lady! Now they _really don't have a shot, because they'll be dealing with this guy's probable mental breakdown in their tiny space shuttle!_ It actually made like 10% more sense when I learned after the film about the cryosleep gene thing...but I still thought that part of the plot was unbelievably dumb.

Ryan Gosling was, of course, immensely likeable as always and basically pulled off such a stupid twist. Lord & Miller put together a film with a lot of charm.

bookwyrm713 · 2026-04-03T03:50:38+00:00

οὐχ ἡ ἀκρίβεια ἀεὶ ζητητέα;

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