I was just going through some notes I had pulled out of storage a few weeks ago in order to transfer them into electronic format and maybe refine them a bit. The one that caught my eye this time is one of the oldest in the bunch, dating back to my junior year in high school. It was written immediately after I got home late one friday night after ( Read more... )

If you read my last post, you're probably wondering, "Why in the heck has he reading about medieval English monarchs?" Well, I asked myself the same question, and then I remembered the answer: I was trying to trace my ancestry. As far as I know, the name Payne comes from the same root as the word pagan - the word peon is also a possible influence ( Read more... )

This is probably the most innapropriately titled post on this blog to date. Despite what the heading may lead you to believe, this post is about British politics in the early medieval period. See, I was reading about the English kings from Alfred to James I this week and I was struck by some of the details in those histories. I actually started ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

There are two obstacles to keeping a journal, as I see it. The first is maintaining the motivation to write. The second is deciding what to write. My usual journalling style eliminates these two obstacles by the simple expedient of only ever writing when there is something I absolutely have to either record or discuss with myself. The first ( Read more... )

The Triumphant Return of the Back Room

Note: after I had nearly completed this entry about a month ago, I shut down my computer without saving it and thus lost the entire thing. In the original iteration I had a brief synopsis of each character along with the particular reasons why he/she made my list and my either my favorite quote from that ( Read more... )

It is commonly thought that the universe is composed of matter and energy. I don't think this is the case. I think that the universe is in fact composed of matter, energy, and information. As far as we are able to percieve, information only exists as ordered distributions of matter or energy. However, it is implied that information can exist ( Read more... )

Tonight's talk at Cornerstone was an introduction to the series of talks for this quarter entitled "Jesus Versus Christianity." The basic idea of the series as far as I understand it is to look at how modern Christian culture and values and behavior diverge from the actual person and example of Christ and to some extent figure out why that is ( Read more... )

After about three and a half weeks, I finally finished Tolstoy's second longest epic novel, Anna Karenina. While still a respectable 864 pages, it doesn't quite measure up to War and Peace at a monolithic 1472 pages. So Anna is big. Real big. But in my opinion, it is not big enough. I think it is very persuasive in its implication of Absolute ( Read more... )

Or at least, that's the first thing I wrote on the paper I was taking notes on tonight. There were a couple of guest speakers at Cornerstone this week. Both were philosophers, one who teaches at a secular university and one who teaches at a seminary. The entertaining part of the evening for me was that, despite not knowing a single thing about ( Read more... )