Sunday, November 26, 2006

Notable Links

* If you haven't looked at the Carnival of Citizens yet, please do so.

* Every academic blogger should read this post at "Slaves of Academe".

* Fr. Daniel Sparks of "Miserere Mei" has a series of posts where you can, via YouTube magic, watch and hear the St. Paul's Cathedral Choir sing a number of hymns and songs.

* Someone just happened to have two lost paintings of Fra Angelico hanging behind their door in Oxford.

* An article on Fulton Sheen via "Insight Scoop".

* I'm currently reading Thomas Kelly's The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement (PDF). I am also browsing some of Alison Gopnik's online papers.

* A rather funny parody of Jack Chick's tracts -- what Stan Lee's Fantastic Four would look like if done by Chick. A small bit of trivia: I had never even heard of Jack Chick until I read about him in a post at Pharyngula one day a year or two ago.

* Rebecca has a good post summarizing the 'Solas' in light of sola fide. Roughly: salvation is through Christ alone, so can be granted by God's grace alone, and can be received by faith alone, so that it is all for God's glory alone; and this can be known through scripture alone. Of course, as is clear from Rebecca's post, this is a minimal understanding -- a jumping-off point -- since appeal to the 'solas' usually has something stronger and more precise than this in mind. But it is the basic starting-point, the one going back to Luther, which (as to details) has manifested itself diversely in diverse theologians.

* In related news, Scott Carson has a Catholic criticism of Protestant understandings of sola scriptura and sola fide.

* Chris at "Mixing Memory" gives some links to the presentations at the recent "Beyond Belief" conference. I can't access them for some reason (a software conflict, I think), but you can also find clips of some of them easily enough at YouTube. The greater part of it seems to be just the standard academic sort of narcissistic self-indulgence (as conferences like this are bound to become, whatever the topic), but I've enjoyed what I've been able to find of Neil DeGrasse Tyson; Steven Nadler has an interesting argument that Spinoza is more accurately called an atheist than a pantheist (interesting, but not, I think, wholly convincing, since while it makes sense of the Ethics, it would seem to make the Tractatus, so dependent on the difference between true and false religion, virtually unintelligible); and Scott Atran has some sharp things to say about criticizing religion in the name of science without regard for actual scientific work on religion.

* Also, Chris has a post worth reading on how scientists deal with unexpected results, which gets into some very cool issues. If I did work in cognitive science, the cognitive science of scientific cognition would be the sort of research I'd want to do. It appeals to my Whewellian side. Plus, 'the cognitive science of scientific cognition' is a very catchy title for a field of inquiry to have.