Thursday, September 20, 2018

Six Pieces of Misunderstood Storytelling Advice – Mythcreants

Six Pieces of Misunderstood Storytelling Advice – Mythcreants:
When storytellers think conflict is defined by explosions and death, it can discourage them. Authors working on lighter stories often think their tales aren’t worth telling because no one dies in them. Worse, some authors reject the notion of conflict entirely because they think it needs to be spaceships shooting lasers at each other. That’s how we end up with stories where nothing happens for chapter upon chapter.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

EXCLUSIVE: Cronin lifts veil on new draft expropriation law | Fin24

EXCLUSIVE: Cronin lifts veil on new draft expropriation law | Fin24:
A task team on expropriation, previously led by Cronin, identified land and property that could be expropriated without compensation as abandoned buildings, unutilised land, commercial property held unproductively and purely for speculative purposes, underutilised property owned by the state, and f land farmed by labour tenants with an absentee titleholder

Sunday, September 16, 2018

The Patriarchal Parishes in the USA - Statement of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church concerning the uncanonical intervention of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church

The Patriarchal Parishes in the USA - Statement of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church concerning the uncanonical intervention of the Patriarchate of Constantinople in the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church:
With profound regret and sorrow the Holy Synod the Russian Orthodox Church learned about the statement made by the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church of Constantinople concerning the appointment of its two “exarchs” to Kiev. This decision was taken without an agreement with the Primate of the Russian Orthodox Church and His Beatitude Metropolitan Onufry of Kiev and All Ukraine – the only canonical head of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. It constitutes a flagrant violation of the ecclesiastical law and an intervention of one Local Church in the territory of the other. Moreover, the Patriarchate of Constantinople presents the appointment of the “exarchs” as a stage in the implementation of a plan aimed at granting “autocephaly” to Ukraine. This process, according to the statements of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, is irreversible and will be carried through.

Angels: What the Bible Really Says About God’s Heavenly Host - Lexham Press

Angels: What the Bible Really Says About God’s Heavenly Host - Lexham Press:
In his latest book, Angels, Dr. Heiser reveals what the Bible really says about God’s supernatural servants. Heiser focuses on loyal, holy heavenly beings because the Bible has a lot more to say about them than most people suspect. Most people presume all there is to know about angels is what has been passed on in Christian tradition, but in reality, that tradition is quite incomplete and often inaccurate.

Monday, September 10, 2018

Aquarius Rising | by Jackson Lears | The New York Review of Books

Aquarius Rising | by Jackson Lears | The New York Review of Books:
Certain years acquire an almost numinous quality in collective memory—1789, 1861, 1914. One of the more recent additions to the list is 1968. Its fiftieth anniversary has brought a flood of attempts to recapture it—local, national, and transnational histories, anthologies, memoirs, even performance art and musical theater. Immersion in this literature soon produces a feeling of d�j� vu, particularly if one was politically conscious at the time (as I was).

Jim Forest's comment:

The religious dimension of American radicalism was what separated it from the student uprisings in Paris and other European cities during the spring of 1968. American radicals lacked the anticlerical animus of Europeans; priests, rabbis, and ministers enlisted in the front ranks of the civil rights and antiwar movements. King’s decision to bear witness against the war was central to legitimating resistance to it, while provoking government counterattacks as well as denunciations from both liberals and conservatives.

“Religion” may be too solemn a word for many 1960s radicals, but it helps to capture the depth of their motives: above all their longing for a more direct, authentic experience of the world than the one on offer in midcentury American society. What made radicals mad, what drove their deepest animus against the war, was their sense that it was a product of the same corporate technostructure—as John Kenneth Galbraith called it in The New Industrial State (1967)—that reduced everyday life to a hamster cage of earning and spending. The tribunes of the technostructure were men like Robert McNamara, who shuttled from the Ford Motor Company to the Defense Department to the World Bank, and who seemed to know everything about managerial techniques but nothing about their ultimate purpose, if indeed there was one. Elite managers were the high priests of an orthodoxy with a blankness, a vacancy, at its center.

The fundamental expression of this vacuity was the war machine that multiplied corpses in Vietnam and nuclear weapons throughout the world. King acknowledged the connection between managerialism and militarism at Arlington Cemetery in February 1968, when he said, “Somewhere along the way we have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live.” A society of means without ends was a society without a soul....

Saturday, September 01, 2018

The Empty Land Myth | South African History Online

The Empty Land Myth | South African History Online:
The Empty or Vacant Land Theory is a theory that was propagated by European settlers in nineteenth century South Africa to support their claims to land. Today this theory is described as a myth, the Empty Land Myth, because there is no historical or archaeological evidence to support this theory. Despite evidence to the contrary a number of parties in South Africa, particularly right-wing nationalists of European descent, maintain that the theory still holds true in order to support their claims to land-ownership in the country.

The Maker of the Maker of Middle-earth | Christianity Today

The Maker of the Maker of Middle-earth | Christianity Today:
Who was J. R. R. Tolkien? Nearly everyone knows him as the author of two of the most beloved books of the 20th century: The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Many also know him as a member of the Inklings and a close friend of fellow writer and scholar C. S. Lewis. Fewer know Tolkien’s work as a literary critic, a world-class academic in medieval literature, a linguist, an inventor of languages, and a visual artist or realize that he was also a devoted husband and father.

Much of this is captured this year in a nearly comprehensive exhibit at Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries on Tolkien’s life and legacy. “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” has been billed as the exhibit of a generation, and it is indeed that. But there’s a glaring omission: any mention of the author’s devout, lifelong Christian faith. Without that piece, we cannot have a true picture of Tolkien.