Joe Carter's Commonplace

Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in [Matthew 6:30], is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him… . We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them… . Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else, and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry… . That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.

— Martyn Lloyd-Jones (via Challies.com)

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

From a letter written to Don Virginio Cesarini from Galileo Galilei (1621) (Via: David Wayne)

Gardening marks, as clearly as any activity, the joining of nature and culture. The gardener makes nothing, but rather gathers what God has made and shapes it into new and pleasing forms. The well-designed garden shows nature more clearly and beautifully than nature can show itself. And this can be a model of politics: people left to their own devices can run riot, make themselves and their environment “ruin’d” and “disorder’d”; properly governed, though, they can flourish, they can become their best selves and make the most of their environment… .We need governors as we need gardeners; but not all forms of government are equally wise or equally beautiful.

From Alan Jacobs review of The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden

Aortic Arch
Corpus Callosum
Islets of Langerhans
Bowman’s Capsule
Cranial Vault
Semicircular Canals
Medullary Pyramids
Brodmann Areas
Crypts of Lieberkühn
Prussack’s Space
Fissure of Rolando
McBurney’s Point
Anterior Horn
Alcock’s Canal
Hesselbach’s Triangle
Loop of Henle
Renal Columns of Bertin

Via: The Science Creative Quarterly