The theatre-goers
On Saturday, we drove to Fort Wayne – a city of a quarter-million people, Indiana’s second-largest – and spent the night with Carol, Karin’s dad’s girlfriend. We met Carol’s family and viewed a local production of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. It was our first trip, since Samuel’s birth, away from the environs of South Bend.
We drove home the next day and took Samuel to his first cinematic screening. It was of Kiki’s Delivery Service, at Notre Dame. Samuel was quiet through the first half of the movie. Then we lost his pacifier and he howled. We watched the last scenes behind the other audience members, near the exit.
It was a good movie to watch in an auditorium full of children. They all cheered for Kiki at the end.
Tomorrow night, Karin and her mother will view a theatrical production of The Lion King. I’ll stay home with Samuel. Matilda and Kiki were quite enough for me.
Besides, there’ll be more of Matilda in the coming months: South Benders will perform the play.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
R.I.P. Terence Penelhum (1929–2020), a Christian philosopher who wrote on religious topics, as well as on David Hume and Joseph Butler. His autobiographical chapter in InterVarsity Press’s Philosophers Who Believe is, for me, one of the more compelling ones. I especially like this passage:
There’s also this story about Penelhum, from a Leiter Reports correspondent:
We drove home the next day and took Samuel to his first cinematic screening. It was of Kiki’s Delivery Service, at Notre Dame. Samuel was quiet through the first half of the movie. Then we lost his pacifier and he howled. We watched the last scenes behind the other audience members, near the exit.
It was a good movie to watch in an auditorium full of children. They all cheered for Kiki at the end.
Tomorrow night, Karin and her mother will view a theatrical production of The Lion King. I’ll stay home with Samuel. Matilda and Kiki were quite enough for me.
Besides, there’ll be more of Matilda in the coming months: South Benders will perform the play.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
R.I.P. Terence Penelhum (1929–2020), a Christian philosopher who wrote on religious topics, as well as on David Hume and Joseph Butler. His autobiographical chapter in InterVarsity Press’s Philosophers Who Believe is, for me, one of the more compelling ones. I especially like this passage:
For a period of some four or five years, … my parents became influenced by Christian Science. This is a sect toward which I have never since been able to assume the attitude of easy derision shown it by both Christian and non-Christian philosophers. Its thought may be egregiously confused; but it has no religious monopoly on this. I can well recall the exemplary serenity of one of the lady readers whom we came to know, and who had been converted to Christian Science through the dramatic physical healing she experienced from it. I also recall very clearly one occasion during the war when we were attending a service and the air-raid sirens sounded. The service was moved to a supposedly less vulnerable part of the building (I think a corridor). Another of the readers made the comment that the move had been made to conform to government regulations, but that since we were all in the care of God’s love, where could we possibly be safer? Such a direct and simple absorption of the New Testament preaching of Jesus (and there was no particle of anxiety) is something I much aspire to now, and have rarely encountered. If it was combined with muddled metaphysics, I am not so consumed by analytical fervor as to believe that this matters greatly.One can see why Hume should have appealed to this philosopher, un-Humeanly modest though he is, Christian though he is.
This brief period introduced me to the possibility of deriving unorthodox results from biblical texts. My recollection may now be faulty; but a frequently repeated juxtaposition of readings yielded the following argument: All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made; God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good; ergo, evil and disease do not really exist. The well-known dismissal of the reality of evil as “error” follows from this conclusion, and the perhaps muddled, but certainly very real, spiritual life of the few Christian Scientists I knew rested in no small measure on this argument.
There’s also this story about Penelhum, from a Leiter Reports correspondent:
[H]e didn’t like going to the American Philosophical Association meetings. He said he couldn’t abide sitting around with his fellow tenured friends drinking while watching all the unemployed new PhD’s running around begging for jobs. This was in the early 80’s. I don’t think much has changed. I always thought well of him for that comment. It revealed to me a kind heart.