David Mahfood

As someone who has spent a lot of time at Disney World I am used to being in made up places

Right back atcha, my man (the second part anyway, unless you're also moving, which I hope you're not!)

Sad to move away from our family and community here in Florida, but we are excited for this new chapter!

Hello friends! Haven't been on here too much, mostly been posting on the other place. But I wanted to share a personal update here too for those of you who I'm only connected to here: we're moving to Murfreesboro! For Jo's job primarily, but I've also found an opportunity to do some teaching.

Mikel Arteta be like:

"Arsenal can still win the League, if Mike Pence has the courage"

There's a whole generation in between me and the boomers

No way man! It wasn't till high school that chatting online became a widespread thing. Didn't get a cell phone till sophomore year of college. And I was born in 1983!

I'm an older millennial and can I just say I genuinely miss talking on the phone to my friends all the time when I was a kid. When I went to college and got a calling card and could talk to my cousin (long distance!) without much of a time limit, it was great.

our common life depends upon each other's toil

Not to toot my own horn but some of us are still having fun on the other website

That's amazing

"Which of you, if your son asks you for bread, would give him a stone? Or if he asks for fish, which of you would give him a snake? So if even you though you're evil know how to give good gifts to your kid,..."

Someone on the other site said that in the Bible Jesus has no sense of humor, but if you ask me "How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?" is a genuinely a funny line, among others.

This kind of open curiosity, I think, can be really fruitful in other, related intellectual disciplines, including ecumenical and interfaith dialog. I highly recommend it. /fin

But in my view, some of the most illuminating work does something more like: assume that, because people are a rational agents, there probably is a rational intelligibility to what they're up to when they convert to a religion, and then ask, if so, what's it like? 2/

A thought sparked by a project I'm working on: A lot of work in philosophy of religion has been about trying to show that some religious belief is or isn't rationally justified according to some preselected standard. And that's generally a fine sort of project. 1/

My word

Cessationists can't explain this

My wife is what some might call a "Disney adult" (not a weird emotionally stunted one—she just likes it and considers being able to go relatively affordably a perk of living in Central Florida). But I'm grateful I've got a buddy who, like me, is mostly in it for the snacks.

He should probably have split his strength into seven objects, but then we must remember how innovative it was in Sauron's day to have even a single Horcrux. Sauron walked so that Voldemort could fly.

nobody:

my six year-old: mom it was so dumb of Sauron to pour all of his strength into the One Ring

No, you get me!

The joke is, people confuse "tenet" and "tenant" enough that, on descriptivist grounds (that is, the view that definitions of words are just descriptions of how people use them), the definition of "tenet" ought to be listed as a valid definition of the word "tenant."

Just an interesting analogy imo to discussions of gratuity in theology. Nothing more to say about it, really, but interested in anyone else's thoughts. /fin

some elements feel... called for, almost necessary, by their relation to the whole, and when they don't, it seems like a kind of failure of intentionality & order on the part of the author. 2/

I've been thinking about the criticism that some elements in an artistic product are "gratuitous." Surely the whole thing is gratuitous in one sense—the author or artist wasn't obligated to make it at all, and is free to do whatever she wants with it. But on another level... 1/

Either!

Descriptivists can't explain why "a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true" does not appear in the dictionary under the word "tenant"

Incredible!