Member: wekooijr

A QUICK P.S. ~ I would be remiss not to also wish you the very best in your writing! Didn't I see a reference in your words here or there to Annie Dillard? Well, if I haven't mistaken or jumbled this recollection, then you are in fine company and excellent hands! That opening paragraph of The Writing Life (on p.3 of my copy), I know by heart. To all this, I shall also add a prayer for you in this toilsome, trying, revealing, and worthwhile endeavor. Gene

posted by GeneRuyle at 1:28 pm (EST) on Mar 23, 2011

Greetings, Chip ~ Thank you for the personal and substantive reply. I quickly clicked on your LT profile links, your website, and soared like a hawk riding a thermal over your extensive bookscape and the textual terrain below. Right, you're a true collector, but for career academicians that rather goes with the territory I think. If not, libraries abut and abound all around, right? I'll be revisiting yours, and its extensive collections, again with an eye to following its heavily-layered strata, trying to sense predominant themes, currents, drifts, and such like. My life path runs outside the academy -- though I've spent many years in and find myself on civil terms with those whose lives are mainly lived out within those walls.

As for Tillich, it's his thinking that has grabbed me, and so I read the books of his I have (and if you look closely at his books I've cataloged so far, you'll see the wear and tear there on every volume; and were you to open them, you'd see the markings crammed into whatever space or margin was originally there, and these constitute a kind of retrieval system for extracting things that struck me to go back to and ponder further. The second page of my website (www.generuyle.com) has a pdf from the Tillich segment in my book, which will furnish you with my take on his significance -- at least for me. Meanwhile, looking forward to returning to your pages and learning more, and wishing you an most invigorating spring leading to an Easter blossoming. Peace and grace, Gene

posted by GeneRuyle at 11:49 am (EST) on Mar 23, 2011

I commend you for what you say about being a "Theology professor with way too many books." Not easy for one to see and say as much about what they're spending their lives doing. I've thinned out my library so many times -- or at least life has and helped make a clearing through which to see more of "the big picture" than before -- but don't you find that it has a way of all too easily getting filled back up again? But as I've now come to see it, it's not the books themselves that are at fault, for they can open or close the mind of those who happen to be reading them at the moment; indeed, any book can be a matter of building up or tearing down -- or now one and now the other at the same time! But regardless of which it may turn out to be, I find they are a most incredible gauge to provide data on the status of the soul of someone at the moment. But isn't it both an art and a science to decipher accurately what the readings "mean"? May your readings lead you to that which you most seek and truly lasts.

posted by GeneRuyle at 7:32 am (EST) on Mar 13, 2011

I see that you added Berkouwer's book, “Man …”. At my blog - link on my profile page - , there are lots of posts on Berkouwer's theology. I hope you'll find something of interest there.

posted by charlescameron at 7:08 pm (EST) on Nov 8, 2010