On philosophy, writing and songs

Greetings! Here I am a whole year older. I had a birthday this week. The truth is that I find birthdays a tricky affair as a single introvert. I don’t especially like organising group events or parties for myself, so mostly I don’t, but then I have to endeavour not to be sad at doing nothing at all on my birthday (and to not think about how nice it would be to have someone to take you to dinner without having to organise it yourself, or to have a family to make you a cake etc). But, this year I was spared all that by the fact that the inaugural meeting of Philosophy Club was scheduled for my birthday! I have wanted to be in a philosophy club for a long time, but it’s not something there is widespread interest in, so I was very pleased when I mentioned the idea to a philosopher and off it went. So thus it came to pass that I spent the evening of my birthday with a little group of folks discussing the merits or otherwise of public reasoning, which was quite fascinating. I am looking forward to learning more things.

It would seem ironic to post this after I haven’t written anything of worth of in a while, but I read this post on where the desire to write comes from recently over at The School of Life, and I had to smile to myself. It perhaps tells a lot of truth. It's not always easy to be able to have a sustained one-on-one conversation with someone, and to have one regularly enough for that to be a sharing of lives and ideas and thoughts.

I have been enjoying a couple of songs of Jess Ray’s again lately. You know how a tune comes around in the blue tooth car audio of every song that it can find in your phone, and you’re like, I am going to listen to that one again. A month or so ago when some actor called Chris Pratt got up and mentioned God and the gospel in his acceptance speech at the MTGV awards (I don’t watch much TV myself, I saw it all on Facebook) there was some criticism of what he said. Which, frankly, I found hard to fathom. So, I appreciated the tweet from Glen Scrivener (an excellent evangelist whom I believe comes from Canberra) in which he said ‘Evangelism is feeding the starving with the Bread of life. Some people (I'm looking at you Chris-Pratt-haters!) think it’s reading out the recipe. Doctrine is vital but articulating doctrines is not offering Christ.’ I thought that was a good point. So this song is more bread than doctrine.

Then there is this one. Oh to be this talented.