YOU
because I want you to have a very large, beautiful life
wherein you contemplate very large, beautiful things
to go straightway to the The CiRCE Institute website
-------do not pass GO do not collect two hundred dollars just go for Pete's sake------
and take advantage of Andrew Kern's brain-tingling offer:
Make any size donation to The CiRCE Institute (always a worthy cause), and they will give you access to a bundle of CiRCE conference lectures.
This is the deal of the year, people! I paid for mine. And I would do it again. I mean, seriously, I keep going back to the site to make sure I read it right. And I did. Yep, it's still there. I just checked again. It still says they will give you these lectures for any size donation. Crazy.
So that is my general plea. Now here's a more specific bit of begging:
Please do not miss Andrew Kern's profound, amazing talk entitled "A Contemplation of Nature."
No, it's not about nature, as in "Oh, let's take a lovely nature walk." It's about... Everything.
I'm guessing some of you will go donate a dollar just to hear this talk, and then you'll go back afterward and donate more when you realize how much more it was worth to you.
Actually, I just told my family last week that I would like to buy several dozen copies of this lecture CD and give it to everyone I know. Stick them in stockings. My neighbors' mailboxes. Mail them instead of Christmas cards. I dunno. I just know it's one of the top five lectures I've ever heard in my life, and I'm kind of a lecture junkie.
I listened to it with Claire a few weeks ago, and we've talked about it so much that the rest of the family and more than a few of our friends have decided they are going to have to listen to it to be able to have a decent conversation with us anytime soon.
Umm, you're still here. Go, please? Oh and hey, then come back and we can talk about it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
9 comments:
Okay, I just went! If you say it's amazing I believe you:) I'm going to listen to "A Contemplation of Nature" first! Thanks so much for the tip!
Oh Lynn, thank you. Now how do we live up to your praise?
Thank you for sharing this!
Lynn, I found this on Cindy's blog and went right away! I listened to Contemplation of Nature over the kitchen speakers while I. was making preparations for her tea party. She was hooked from the moment he said, "Inklings".
I need to listen to it again, though, because I keep making the mistake of thinking 'natural' (as in occuring in the wild, ie., nature) and 'nature' (as in the essence of a thing) are the same, but they're not, right?
Natural, in Kern's usual usage, runs more along the lines of "according to its inherent nature."
It seems to me (and I could be remembering this with my own mental slant attached) that when he means nature as in "out in the wild" he's more apt to refer to that as "creation."
I phrased my question badly. Let me try again. I keep wanting to make the'inherent nature' of a thing mean something like Rousseau's noble savage. That isn't where he's headed, is it? (I don't think it can be, because of "purpose and propriety". So then I think it must be the nature God intended whatever-it-is to have, but then I get confused and have to stop.)
Katie, Your instincts are right - go with them. Rousseau's noble savage was a raging denial of Genesis, and therefore reality, and as such was merely vain delusion. Kern's not going anywhere near Rousseau for his definitions. Rather, he's attempting to restore a paradigm from biblical foundations.
We all come face to face with closet skeletons from our deluded Darwinian educations from time to time. Sounds like that might be what you're wrestling with.
Your inherent nature is what God gave you; tarnished by the fall, yes, but bearing the mark of the Creator still. It's your divine wiring, in other words. So nature, in this context, is the divine wiring inherent in anything under Heaven's rule. And you're right in that it cannot rightly be separated from purpose and propriety, at least not without wretched results.
Yay! Thank you, Lynn.
Dear Lynn, I'm looking forward to listening. Your description/reader's comments remind me of the Nature Walks we used to take on Cripplegate Farm. When the children were bored, I would cry aloud, "Children, look what GOD put over there! and the race was on, with trills of joy. Thanks for the memories. Wish I could still talk those walks, and had all the children around me. -Dwayne Shafer
Post a Comment