Center for Barth Studies Renovation

As a part of the new library renovation at PTS, the Center for Barth Studies has recently moved into their new home on the third floor of the PTS library. I had a chance to visit yesterday afternoon and snapped a few photos. Note, this is only one of the rooms, but it is the main room for referencing their materials if you are a researcher. They have a large office area next door where hard working folks were updating the Barth Literature Search Project and tolerating a kindly interruption from me.  There's another archival area where miscellaneous holdings are kept, including (I believe I heard this right), some unpublished Barth materials. It's a beautiful new place. Here are the photos:

Barth Reading Group with Dr. George Hunsinger at PTS

For those in the Princeton area, you might want to join this semester's Barth reading group led by Dr. George Hunsinger. I'll be there. Here are the readings and the schedule:

The Wisdom of Repugnance

From Leon Kass in The Ethics of Human Cloning (pg. 19):

Repugnance [...] revolts against the excesses of human willfulness, warning us not to transgress what is unspeakably profound. Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.

The session that did not shake the world

We humans must be forgiven from time to time for missing important things. I do it. You do it. We all do it.

Thus did I laugh when I recently stumbled upon a remarkable entry into the annals of history by Thomas Bell, an English dentist with an interest in reptiles, who was also president of the Linnean Society of London in the year 1858. 

Why is that significant? Of that year's scientific lectures, presentations, etc. before the society, Dr. Bell wrote this: 

"...[the year had not] been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionise [sic], so to speak, the department of science on which they bear, it is only at remote intervals that we can reasonably expect any sudden and brilliant innovation which shall produce a marked and permanent impression on the character of any brand of knowledge, or confer a lasting and important service on mankind."

Alas, 1858, described here by Dr. Bell, was the year that both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace jointly presented a paper about their ideas about natural selection and biological evolution to the society. As time would tell, it was perhaps the most important and now famous session of the society since its founding in 1788.

Free Logos Book: Creation and Fall by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Where there's Barth (for e.g., here on this blog), there's always room for Bonhoeffer. The Logos bible software free book for August is Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall, volume 3 in his collected works. It's a theological exposition of Genesis 1-3. These were lectures originally delivered by Bonhoeffer at the University of Berlin in 1932-33 during the demise of the Weimar Republic and the birth of the Third Reich. In the course of these events, Bonhoeffer called his students to focus their attention on the word of God the word of truth in a time of turmoil.

Note for Logos users: when you download this volume for free you will be given the opportunity to download another volume from the collected works, vol. 7, Fiction from Tegel Prison, as well.

If you use Logos, don't miss it. It's a great deal.