"It's like 80 proof wisdom."

This title is courtesy of the one and only Charlie. He was talking about Thomas Merton's book No Man Is an Island. Tyler has convinced a few of us to have an informal reading group for it. I've just finished chapter one, and I agree with Charlie. Merton is like a shot of rum for the spirit, especially because you don't realize the full effects until you've closed the book after a reading.

Speaking of interesting books, I'm reading one called Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia for my Religion & Social Change class. It's really, really good. Here is one of my favorite passages:

"Religious faith, even when it is fed from a common source, is as much a particularizing force as a generalizing one, and indeed whatever universality a given religous tradition manages to attain arises from its ability to engage a widening set of individual, even idiosyncratic, conceptions of life and yet somehow sustain and elaborate them all.

When it succeeds in this, the result may indeed as often be the distortion of these personal visions as their enrichment, but in any case, whether deforming private faiths or perfecting them, the tradition usually prospers. When it fails, however, to come genuinely to grips with them at all, it either hardens into scholasticism, evaporates into idealism, or fades into eclecticism; that is to say, it ceases, except as a fossil, a shadow, or a shell, really to exist."

- Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed

Feel free to provide your thoughts.

I've determined that college students use under 20 adjectives regularly. So, grab a thesaurus and join me in at least finding words to use instead of random, intense, cool, interesting, and ridiculous.

So far, I've come up with unplanned, arbitrary, casual, chance, erratic, accidental, extreme, acute, fierce, potent, extraordinary, chic, trendy, sophisticated, absorbing, engrossing, fascinating, riveting, gripping, compelling, captivating, engaging, enthralling, stimulating, thought-provoking, intriguing, laughable, comical, absurd, hilarious, risible, farcical, ludicrous, and droll.

I had better go catch a bus home.

Peace,
Sam
P.S. We had a brief but productive CSN meeting today. Progress is being made every day.