This was a charming little “Socratic” dialog between Augustine and his beloved, albeit illegitimate from his pre-Christian past, son. The two want to discover how man conveys knowledge.

All human communication must be the form of signs. But signs are meaningless unless one knowns what they mean. (Consider, as a vastly-oversimplified example, what would happen if the government had instituted stop signs without clarifying their meaning.) Some mechanism must reveal the significates to man.

In Augustine that force is God, but I tend to give more credence to the Tomist answer—humans have the innate, God-given ability to connect signs and significates using their own reason.

Either way, worth the read.

Poor Kierkegaard. You have to understand the poor man’s tragic life before you understand this book—he’s built an entire theological system out of his personal misfortune.

His father grew up as an impoverished shepherd and, one cold evening, cursed God for his misfortune. Even though he ended his life as a wealthy merchant, he always felt God cursed him in reciprocity. He told this to his children that they, too, were cursed. (The sins of the father…) Soren, born disfigured and perhaps caustic by nature, never stood a chance under these circumstances.

Soren went to school and fell in love with a beautiful young woman named Regine (pronounced like “regina”) Olson. Despite his apperance, he convinced her to marry him. After both families gave their blessing, however, he decided that poor Regine’s life would be ruined if she married him. Rather than tell her this—Regine being a noble girl would have told him that she was willing to take the risk—he cruelly broke of the engagement by telling her he was no longer interested and went to the theater.

Acting in this way, Kierkegaard became what he called a “knight of infinite resignation,” giving up his will wholey to God. For the rest of his life, he saught to become a “knight of faith” with so much confidence in God and the “strength of the absurd” who would be granted what he wished.

Fear and Trembling is beautiful and tragic, a short tract from the philosophical father of twentieth-century existentialism that is well worth the read.

This was an extremely interesting and fairly prophetic book by one of my favorite turn-of-the-last-century authors, G. K. Chesterton. (Chesterton, by the way, was one of the primary influences on the spirituality of C. S. Lewis.) This is the first “political” book of Chesterton’s that I have read—most of his other texts are primarily religious, or at least theological.

Chesteron has a great deal to say in many of his books about social justice and he reprises his emphasis on distributivism here. I’ll leave it to minds smarter than mind to weigh in on Chesterton’s economic ideas (Adam, my brilliant boyfriend, seems extremely skeptical). He does, however, pose some arguments about female nature with which the twenty-first century woman is quite unfamiliar. Some of these, especially those against suffrage, cause me to raise my eyebrows in discomfort. Others, however, are quite compelling. For example, a woman should not have to work because she does not see that man’s working world is a joke she will take too seriously. Woman should not be forced to specialize because men need a partner who is an amatuer (from the Latin word, amare, to love—someone who does something simply because she loves it).

This is an overall interesting read, even if read merely as a period piece.

A strange, later dialog with interesting parts but a lot of material about triangles and physical science which I fail to understand.

I’m marking it “worth reading” simply because it is a dialog all students should read, not necessarily because I enjoyed it.

This is a must-read for students interested in ancient or medieval philsophy. It is an interesting transitional dialog. I just finished short paper if you care for a better summary.

A surprisingly dry account of the Methodist faith. Perhaps I should look elsewhere for a more comprehensive summary.

The essay was too steeped in sola scriptura for my now-Catholic tastes, but it did conclude with a pleasant reminder that, for all of it’s rich, intellectual tradition, Christianity is a religion so simple that even a child can understand it… possibly better than a scholar.

Definately read this piece if you are interested in the history of Christianity.

Hmmm… not quite as good as I expected. But a short and enjoyable book never the less.

Well, only one play left in my borrowed copy of The Selected Plays of Oscar Wilde. I’d like to say that reaching the end saddens me more than it does, but most of Wilde’s “non-Earnest” plays seem to have the same plot:

One member of a married couple has a terrible secret he or she may or may not know, often involving an unknown parent. The secret, no matter how tedious, would ruin his or her reputation in the high society Wilde seeks to critique. A series of fortuitous events prevents discovery. The audience sees that the character society would most quickly condemn is in many ways a hero or heroine.

In An Ideal Husband, the husband—ideal because he has been placed on a metaphorical pedestal by his wife—is the one with a terrible secret. His hero is a foppish dandy who is taken seriously by no one. (I tried to explain foppish to my boyfriend last week and couldn’t do so without the word dandy… but then I couldn’t explain dandy without foppish, although dictionary.com seems to have the same problem.)

An entertaining read, but I could have lived happily having never read it.