Bror Erickson

great refresher

Revisado: 08-05-21

I find this program to be an easy way to refresh and deepen my knowledge of Soanish as I walk in the mornings. I notice great improvement speaking to others.

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The Problems of a Pluralistic Society

Revisado: 08-27-19

I rather enjoyed this course. It was a fun investigation of the problem of ethics and the rule of law in a pluralistic society. I found some of his arguments to be lacking but even then informative. Finally, I enjoyed learning where this modern push for "virtue ethics" that is appealing to many today, but lacking a reality check, is coming from. He at least exposes the problems, this does not say he solves them by any means.

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Great History

Revisado: 08-07-19

Molly Worthen does just a phenomenal job with this course. We may be in a post Constantinian society, we may not be yet. As Dr. Worthen shows the history of Christianity is one that defies odds time and again. Still, understanding Christian history is necessary to understand cultural and national history in the United States. It is necessary for us as Christians to understand where we are and how we have gotten here as Christians. A study like this also does wonders to see how the church has navigated these waters in the path.
Worthen understands the history. Starting with proto-reformers such as Savonarola, to Luther, Zwingli and Calvin, the English reformation and the Boxer rebellion, she covers not only the history of Christianity in the west but also the orient and southern hemisphere. She discusses the trends of liberal protestantism, and conservative Catholicism bringing just absolutely incredible insight to the history of the faith in every turn. I cannot recommend this series of lectures enough.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Viking's Creed

Revisado: 08-07-19

"Never back down from a fight, Say no one ever kills you, old age ain't much of a peach either." The line sticks out at me. The whole poem is a great insight into the values and understandings of people in the viking era. The translation reads smoothly. The narration is great.

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Easy Peasy Chinesy!

Revisado: 07-07-17

I never thought I would have a use for learning Chinese. I live in a smallish town in New Mexico. When I go for my walks in the morning I always run into a Chinese man and we could never communicate. I don't know how he lives here but he doesn't speak any English to speak of. So I decided it would be fun to learn Chinese and maybe get to a point where I could help him learn English. Wow!
I started the course, I was afraid that I might not get the intonation right. But after a few days, I said hi to him in Chinese and started speaking. Our first conversations were rather short and broken. And I still find myself at a loss for what to say. But he has no trouble understanding what I do say. And it has made my morning walks so much more fun.
I have moved on now to level II. I love Pimsleur.
You will have to go elsewhere to learn the writing process and how to read Chinese. I haven't even begun any of that. People say you can't learn a language just listening. They are wrong. You can. there are plenty of people who don't read and write. It may be easier to learn with reading and writing helps, but Chinese poses a special problem in that area as there is nothing phonetic about their writing process, though there is a new writing system that uses the western alphabet, a sort of pidgin. It isn't very helpful to go that route as far as I can tell. However, you can learn to speak without learning to write, and it is worth doing that. It takes a bit of work. I give the levels more than one listen through before moving to the next level, and usually, review the previous level after working through the next level once. Then while I'm listening to a lesson I try to think of things I would like to say or ask from my friend in the park. I love the conversational emphasis of Pimsleur in general. I love that you have a conversation with the program in order to learn. But it sure does make it more memorable when I use what I have learned with an actual person in a real conversation. If you don't have a Chinese guy in the park to talk to, you can probably find someone to talk to online.

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esto le resultó útil a 11 personas

The American Work Ethic Meets Food And Wine

Revisado: 03-09-17

According to Ecclesiastes, there are four things that God gives to man to make life enjoyable: bread, wine, the work of your hands and sex. In America, the protestant work ethic has emphasized the one to its own detriment. But here, where bread, that is food in all its forms, is the focus of the protestant work ethic, well then we begin to see life become enjoyable again.
The book starts with the CMC test at the Culinary Institute of America. It tracks six chefs taking this beast of a test and documents their triumphs and failures as well as the pros and cons of the test. The book then turns to look at other chefs running restaurants. Some of these chefs have taken the CMC others have not. It talks about their successes. It makes you want to eat. It makes you want to cook. It makes you want to travel and spend money on food.
Most especially, it makes you want to visit the French Laundry in Napa Valley California. Much of this book centers on Thomas Keller and the menu at the French Laundry. It becomes rather autobiographical concerning him and his pursuit of perfection in the kitchen that led to the success of this famed restaurant. This is definitely the American (protestant) work ethic meets food and wine in a rags-to-glory-story that is encouraging and inspiring.
I enjoyed the book. It was fun to learn the ins and outs of restaurant cooking, and what goes into becoming a chef. Most of the book concentrates on French and French-influenced cooking. This is something I knew a lot less about before reading this book and it makes me want to try a few things and learn more in this avenue.

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Christianity, The Rational Faith

Revisado: 02-24-17

These lectures are phenomenal.
John Warwick Montgomery is an apologist for the Christian faith and director of the Institute for “Apologetics, Evangelism and Human Rights” in Strasbourg France. His interest in apologetics started when he ran into other apologists in college who were instrumental in his own conversion. He has several degrees across numerous disciplines and he uses this knowledge in many creative ways to advance the gospel and make a sound argument for the rationality of the Christian faith.
In these lectures, Dr. Montgomery focuses primarily on the historical argument for the Christian faith based on the resurrection, with passing commentary on the classical arguments for the existence of God such as the Teleological argument. His focus on the resurrection is refreshingly unforgiving. Everything is focused on this one point or proceeds directly from it. He refuses to get caught up in arguments for creationism, or cultural issues. The veracity of the Christian faith rests on the resurrection, everything else is secondary at best. But if a person is brought to believe in the resurrection of Christ those secondary things will fall into place.
These lectures were recorded almost forty years ago, and they are still as beneficial today as they were then. However, some of the chapters have clearer audio than others. The first couple chapters have a bit of static. You can still hear the lecture, it just isn’t what is expected today with recordings made with modern recording equipment. It is probably even a little sub par for its day. I spoke with the publishers of the material and understand that the original recordings have been lost and they have not been able to clean the audio up any more than this. However, if you can get past the first few lectures, the audio quality increases greatly at about chapter 4.
I can’t recommend these lectures enough for those who are interested in evangelism. Many people confuse this term with the culture war, and lose the gospel, the forgiveness of sins in Christ crucified, your justification in His Resurrection. Dr. Montgomery’s lectures are a refreshing exception to that. His focus is the gospel itself, arguing that if you apply the principles of historical investigation and logic that everyone whether Christian, Hindu or atheist needs to use to navigate even their daily lives, one will arrive at the conclusion that the man who claimed to be God really did rise from the dead and that he did this for you.

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The Problem of Man

Revisado: 07-21-16

The Invention of Nature; Alexander von Humboldt’s New World
We live in a world and a climate greatly influenced by a forgotten man. That Man is Alexander von Humboldt.
Perhaps you have gone hunting the Himalayan Snow Cock in the Humboldt Mountains of Nevada, or enjoyed the recently legalized produce of the Humboldt County growers in northern California and wondered who this Humboldt was. This book tells you. It is kind of amazing though that so much should be named after this man in North America as he didn’t spend much time here. He did stop momentarily on his way back to Europe. He became friends with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
This book chronicles the life of Alexander von Humboldt from his tortured childhood on through to his great adventures in South America and Russia. It speaks of his many discoveries and his prolific writing which influenced others such as Darwin and Muir, even Thoreau, as well as his strained relationship with both the Kaiser of Prussia and Napoleon. It discusses his concept of balance in nature or Naturgemälde, and explores the publication of such works as Cosmos.
Where the book stays on task it was very interesting. However, Andrea Wulf thought she would give you 6 biographies for the price of one. Yes, he was friends with Bolivar. They had a relationship. Humboldt inspired Bolivar to revolt and break the colonial relationship of South America with Spain. Humboldt’s opinion of Bolivar changed over the course of Bolivar’s life. That’s nice to know. But I wasn’t bargaining for a history of Latin America. I spent three days listening to a biography of Bolivar that rarely mentioned Humboldt. Another day or two listening to a biography of Darwin. Another extensive biography of Muir. Then a biography of some man who was Ambassador to Turkey. I can’t remember the man’s name and I don’t want to. And then a biography of Alexander von Humboldt’s son. And honestly each of these biographies were books in themselves. I might have found them interesting if I wasn’t trying to listen to a biography of Humboldt. In this book it came off as filler fluff, distracting from the main topic. I suppose one could argue it was some sort of literary Naturgemälde in itself, showing how all of these concepts were interconnected.
Finally, the book chronicles the downfall of Humboldt’s popularity. He had an interesting and even poetic way of writing about nature. His writing even impressed Goethe, the Shakespeare of the German language! Ironically, Humboldt preferred to write in French. He made great observations and was an incredible explorer. People loved his writing. He exposed what we would deem environmental disasters today and showed what must be done to stop them in the future, or at least curtail them. But his observations lacked scientific experimentation in and of themselves. (They however did inspire scientific experimentation). As science progressed scientific study became much more specialized and there is hardly any room today for a book like Cosmos which would try to unify so many different scientific disciplines and findings into an overarching narrative. Finally, anti-German sentiment surrounding two world wars pitting the English Speaking world against Germany had the effect of sending Humboldt’s name off into oblivion. Which is why today you can hunt Himalayan Snow Cock in the Humboldt Mountains and have no idea who Humboldt was, or why those mountains are named for a man who never saw them.
I wrestle with the ideas of Humboldt. We all do. Every day, when we turn the key in our car and think that perhaps we are contributing to Climate Change with our commute to work, and ought to ride a bicycle instead. It’s a strange title to the book, “The Invention of Nature.” We perhaps wouldn’t think of nature the same way if it wasn’t for Humboldt. Or political discourse would not be as torn as it is today between the efforts of conservationists and preservationists. Maybe we would still see it as something to be exploited. However, I’m always a little uneasy about a supposed naturalist position that doesn’t have room for man in nature as a part of nature. From a creationist standpoint I can see validity in separating man from nature to a degree. If, though, man is nothing more than the product of evolution, the Darwinian Theory that Humboldt laid the framework for, it is harder to justify the position. A person might argue that man plowing the fields around Lake Valencia and growing indigo, something Humboldt objected to, is no more an environmental disaster than a Beaver building a damn. It changes the face of nature, but it is still nature at work.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

When Skepticism is Not Questioning the Status Quo

Revisado: 04-29-16

There are numerous critical reviews of this lecture series. Frankly, I am inclined to agree with them.
The title is a bit ironic. It implies that you should want to think like a scientist. However, once listening to the lecture he spends time talking about how even scientists are fools and fall for this and that magic trick.
At the same time, his skepticism is a far cry from anything that I have ever been accustomed to knowing as skepticism. For instance, when it comes to topics like climate change or evolution he doesn’t question how these scientists (who he admits are fallible) have come to their conclusions. He just accepts them. He even says, “when it comes to climate change I used to be a skeptic but I no longer am because the majority of scientists agree with it.” Why not an investigation into the reasons behind the dissent among those that don’t? The majority has been wrong the majority of the time if you are to give any credence to history. My first thought in this lecture series was, “Since when did accepting the status quo because it is the status quo become skepticism.” When it comes to skepticism I think he could do well to perhaps read some of the critiques that Thomas Nagel of New York University puts forward in “The Last Word” or “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament.”
When he discusses the scientific method and what it is he backtracks to say that not all science is done this way. Well, then what makes it science?
The book is good in those places where it tracks Shermer’s own exploits and investigations into the “paranormal” showing how the ruse behind card and palm reading works, the inconsistencies behind fortune telling and astrology. In the end, though, he falls victim to the same confirmation bias he warns against for others and shows himself remarkably unwilling to apply his same methods of criticism to evolution and scientific naturalism as he is willing to apply to creationism. A topic that occupies a good portion of the book.

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Brilliantly Disturbing

Revisado: 04-02-16

Chuck has a way. These are stories that probe the demons and perversions of America's soul in a brilliantly disturbing way. I loved them for their character studies. The plots and twists were what I have come to expect from Palahniuk, but it is what a person loves him for. In short, these stories are like drinking distilled versions of his novels one shot at a time, full strength and unrefined. It’s fun watching a creative genius at work. It definitely makes me want to find time for a public reading of his in the future. It was even more fun listening to the stories with Chuck’s personal intonation of them. If you like Palahniuk then you will enjoy these short stories.

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