Food for Thought ~ The Impeded Stream Sings

“Art always emerges from constraint. Art comes out of the margins of your life.” ~Jeff Goins

 

Do you think the ideas in the above two quotes are related?

 

And a little bit of everything:

:: How much business is your profanity costing you? @ Michael Hyatt

If you can’t be interesting without profanity, then let’s face it: you’re not that interesting.

:: Prison vs. Harvard in an Unlikely Debate @ The Wall Street Journal [Incredible.]

On one side of the stage at a maximum-security prison here sat three men incarcerated for violent crimes.

On the other were three undergraduates from Harvard College.

…The debaters on both sides aimed to highlight the academic power of a program, part of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., that seeks to give a second chance to inmates hoping to build a better life.

…The Bard program’s leaders say that out of more than 300 alumni who earned degrees while in custody, less than 2% returned to prison within three years, the standard time frame for measuring recidivism.

:: Chesterton Casts a Spell on Tolkien @ The Imaginative Conservative

There is, however, a sense in which those who turn their back on fairy-stories are also turning their back on the very world in which we live because, as Chesterton insists, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds but the best of all impossible worlds. If we have the eyes of humility, the eyes of wonder, we will realize that we are living in a fairy-story, and not only any old fairy-story but the best of all fairy-stories.

:: Making the World More Beautiful (with Miss Rumphius) by Laura Peterson @ Story Warren

She’s not suffering the type of vocational crisis that I think our well-meaning Christian culture can emphasize, worrying over what her “calling” is.  She goes through her life, and when she sees an opportunity to bring beauty to a place that was short on it, she takes it. That’s all.

:: A Conversation with Marilynne Robinson @ Image Journal

If God makes the world, populates the world, infuses the world with every kind of ethical meaning, then the signature of God is the beauty of the world. Why even imagine a mystical experience when we’re born into one, submerged in one, day after day?

:: A Manifesto for Liberal Education by Eva Brann @ The Imaginative Conservative

"Let us offer to the young some (let it be four) clear years for becoming not a this or a that, but for learning to be a human being, whose powers of thought are well exercised, whose imagination is well stocked, whose will has conceived some large human purpose, and whose passions have found some fine object of love about which to crystallize."

:: Who Killed the Liberal Arts? @ PragerU (video)

:: Lecture me. Really. @ The New York Times

"A lecture is not the declamation of an encyclopedia article. In the humanities, a lecture “places a premium on the connections between individual facts,” Monessa Cummins, the chairwoman of the classics department and a popular lecturer at Grinnell College, told me. “It is not a recitation of facts, but the building of an argument.”

:: Classical Chats with Matt Bianco [The four levels of knowledge]

:: I love this story about an extraordinary man named Derek.

:: Forever a Novice @ Tresta Payne

[W]ho I really am comes out in the worst moments, not in the best, and I think sometimes that the words I write (which are the thoughts I think) are the truest forms of my soul – with all the commas missing and misplaced; the lack of degree, obvious; the semi-colons placed wherever I want them because that’s just how I think they go and I don’t have to be an expert to tell you what life is like, in so many words.