Quote for a Sunday: where Isaac Watts echoes C.S. Lewis

"If folly or vice be represented in its open colours, or its secret disguises, let us search our hearts, and review our lives, and inquire how far we are criminal; nor should we ever think we have done with the treatise while we feel ourselves in sorrow for our past misconduct, and aspiring after a victory over those vices, or till we find a cure of those follies begun to be wrought upon our souls." ~~ Isaac Watts (thank you to The Common Room for posting the longer version)

Great stuff to read this weekend

The Common Room shares a number of insights on reading by Isaac Watts. One thought:

"And remember that one book read over in this manner, with all this laborious meditation, will tend more to enrich your understanding, than the skimming over the surface of twenty authors."

Joshua Butcher, at the Circe blog, talks about the problems of translating classical authors, and quotes Alan Bloom:

To this Bloom replies that such translators have, “the assurance that they have a sufficient understanding of Plato’s meaning, and that that meaning is pretty much the kind of thing Englishmen or Americans already think. However, it might be more prudent to let the reader decide whether ‘the beautiful and the good’ are simply equivalent to ‘moral values.’ If they are the same, he will soon enough find out. And if they are not, as may be the case, he will not be prevented from finding that out and thereby putting his own opinions to the test.” 

Coffee, Tea, Books and Me talks about soup and cookbooks.

"Tamar Adler shared why most of us have bland bean soup and why the soup she made for Chez Panisse was delicious.  It is because we I have believed an old wive's tale about not salting beans that are cooking from the very beginning."

Socks for a cause at Ten Thousand Villages.

Prime Periwinkle thinks about bees (sort of).

To Sow a Seed has some words for parents.

"These brief years of raising children give way to a lifetime of relationship. The little boy who comes to you for ten bandaids today, the little girl who tattles on her sister every chance she gets… these are the people who will hold your hand as the older generation passes away, who will comfort you as your own days come to a close and Jesus is nearer than ever before."

Advent III: Of snowglobes and snowstorms

Sorry I could not get this posted yesterday--computer time was short and I have been a little under the weather, in the other sense. This is for those who feel they're being shaken in a snowglobe lately. As the DHM noticed--the figures inside the globe stay put, even through the stormy blast.

O God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.

Under the shadow of Thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;
Sufficient is Thine arm alone,
And our defense is sure.

--Isaac Watts