Being tagged ...

I have been tagged for the following meme by la mamma. She got it from Gem of the Ocean, who got it from ... I seem to remember doing it a while ago, but I have since re-organised my office, so will do it differently.

1. Take the nearest book.
2. Turn to page 56.
3. Copy out the 5th sentence, and then the next 2-5 lines after that.
4. Name the book (As Karen says, well, duh!)
5. Inflict this on 5 other victims.

1. The nearest books as I sit at the keyboard are a pile of Maryvale PGCE coursebooks.

3.The absolute moral norms taught by the Church ('Do not commit adultery' and so on) are ways of protecting the person.

And the next five lines or so.

Read VS 96-97 on this point. The idea of commandments is viewed with suspicion by many people, and they resist allowing the notion of God's commandments to have any significant place in morality. A fear of legalism may be at the base of this. As we have seen, a legalistic concept of morality makes the idea of law, or of rules, primary so that the person is subordinated to them. A Christian cannot take this approach, since God's fullest revelation of himself was not a book or a set of commandments or instructions, but was as a human being. Modern moral thinking is rightly 'personalist' ie it is based upon an understanding of the nature of the person and what kinds of actions accord with our true good and dignity.

4. The book is coursebook C5 Personal, Moral and Social Education including Every Child Matters and Citizenship 2008 Edition.

If you feel that you would like to participate, take yourself as being one of my five nominees!

Now, if I had been sitting in my living room you might have had Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Study Edition of the Lectionary for Mass, Louis Bouyer's Eucharist, Henri de Lubac's Corpus Mysticum... or the Officium Divinum ex decreto Sacronsancti Oeucumenici Concilii Vaticani II instuaratum acutoritate Pauli PP. VI promulgatum.

Book meme

Rita has tagged me on the 123 book meme. She wonders whether it will be a physics book or one to do with religious faith. Being indecisive, I am going to do both, both books being pulled off my shelves with moderate randomness.

The meme, by the way, is: (1) find the nearest book, with more than 123 pages. (2) open p 123 (3) find the 5th sentence(4) post the next three.

The Physics book is: Charles Kittel Introduction to Solid State Physics 6th edn. And as you might have predicted p.123 is a page of questions at the end of a chapter on phonons:

2. Rms thermal dilation of a crystal cell.[Does this count as a sentence?] (a) Estimate for 300 K the root mean square thermal dilation delta V/V for a primitive cell of sodium. Take the bulk modulus as 70 000 000 000 erg per centimetre cubed [what an awful unit!]. Note that the Debye temperature 158 K is less than 300 K, so that the thermal energy is of the order kBT.

The theology book is Karl Rahner Foundations of Christian Faith.

Even with respect to the created subject presupposed as already existing, God's self-communication is a further miracle of his free love which is the most self-evident thing of all, and at the same time it cannot be logically deduced from anything else. The doctrine that grace and fulfillment in the immediate vision of God are supernatural does not mean that the supernatural "elevation" of a spiritual creature is added extrinsically and accidentally to the essence and the structure of a spiritual subject of unlimited transcendence. In the concrete order which we encounter in our transcendental experience and as interpreted by Christian revelation, the spiritual creature is constituted to begin with as the possible addressee of such a divine self-communication.

I do not lay any claim to great understanding of either of the above - perhaps commenters could vote as to which of the two they think is most intelligible! My understanding of the physics, in particular, has undergone exponential decay over some length of time ....