11 Comments
Jul 12Liked by Edrith

Years ago, I was in a meeting with the Chief Executive of the City of London Corporation who was asked why the Corporation funded the Barbican Arts Centre. Her answer was that the people who the City Corporation wished to encourage to work and live in the City expected a major international city to have an internationally competitive cultural offering - even if they personally never took advantage of it

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That feels an unusually enlightened approach! Long may it continue.

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Jul 12Liked by Edrith

I really enjoyed this: the illuminating application of a non-obvious theological analogy to a contemporary political topic, the even-handed pointing out of an inconsistency/reversal in both left-wing and right-wing thinking, the entertaining asides, and the bonus Foundation reference.

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Jul 12Liked by Edrith

Congrats on the book! I should read the first one (although I'm somewhat afraid to because there have been a couple of people whose blogs I enjoy and whose novels I read as a result and really didn't enjoy and then felt kind of guilty. Even Unsong I did like but not as much as I like Scott's blogging.)

Can I make a suggestion on the cover design, or is it too late? It has a bit of an amateur self-published vibe, and I think this is because the text doesn't stand out very well from the background. The text is completely flat and monochrome, and the I in particular isn't very well distinguished from the mountain background. I think it might help if the text had a slight subtle outline or shadow, or maybe if you kept the existing text colour for the title (which is against the sky, so contrasts well) but put your name (which is against the darker mountains) in a different colour.

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Jul 12Liked by Edrith

I thought the cover looked really good, but I agree it would be better with the text like Rachael suggests

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author

Thank you!

You definitely shouldn't read the first one a week before I release a new, improved version of it! But hopefully after that you should. :-) I think my book is both less brilliant and less flawed than Unsong; overall I love Unsong, but I think I had a better editor (principally S5 R6).

Cover design suggestion is really helpful! I think what we're seeing here is that the picture was done by my friend who is really good at AI art, and then I just added the text in PowerPoint. I will have another play and see if I can make it look better in the way you suggest.

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Now is when you should read the first book, with the new improved version out! :-)

I hope you like the cover writing better. It turns out Amazon had a 'cover designer' which could do good text style if you uploaded an image, which made things easier.

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Jul 14Liked by Edrith

I very much enjoyed this article, and your particular turns of phrase such as 'the literary merit of a whelk’s autobiography', and your karate resolution of theological disagreement (yeah, I'm biased). However, that didn't stop me spotting:

Footnote 4 should say Unconditional Election not undonditional election (election of everyone who isn't a university don?)

I don't know what you mean by "The state provides the library, yes, *no-one can get to the library by themselves*, but it is up to each individual’s free will as to whether or not they go." I suspect there's a typo here, but can't work out what it is.

"The Calvinist view of public services falls down [...] in denying human agencies" probably means humans agency

Footnote 14 endearingly relabels the last letter of TULIP as the persistence of the saints, which I think we should interpret in as compscish a way as possible.

Some missing words in "It is a view of the public - particularly of the more disadvantaged - [that] robs them wholly of agency, a form of total depravity in which [they are] rendered so helpless by their disadvantage that they [are] unable to exercise the free will to choose to use a service or not."

"For the uninitiated, Beast Quest is a series by a number of authors collectively known as ‘Adam Blade’. In each series ..." the first sentence should probably say series of series in order to let the second sentence make sense.

In "we’d be just be fine" the first be is to be and the second be is not to be :-).

"a shelter into a better world" is an odd image. Possibly you wrote gateway, and then edited it for repetition with the previous sentence?

I can't tell if "im.provement" is a deliberate joke or an error.

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Thank you! I think these are all fixed.

By 'no-one can get to the library by themselves' I was referring to the fact that public-service-Arminians accept the necessity of grace; i.e. you cannot go to a public library of your own agency unless the state has provided one. But this was evidently utterly unclear and I have amended.

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Jul 14Liked by Edrith

I think Calvinism and Arminianism work very well for the way you use them in this post, but for the record rather than saying "[Arminius] disagreed with Calvin about lots of things", it would be more exact to say that Arminius agreed with Calvin about everything except 3/5s of TULIP.

Most of the issue here is that Calvin was a bit like Aristole. Aristole was a genius, but his good ideas, like discovering logic, are so completely assumed by everyone that it's only his mistakes (like his views on women) that we credit to him. In the same way most of Calvin's ideas have become so assumed by the entire of Protestanism (if not much wider) that we now only associate his name with his contentious or wrong ideas. Arminius was a student of Beza, a student of Calvin. The point about Arminius isn't that he was the first to raise free will, it's that he raised it an otherwise entirely Calvinist framework.

TULIP isn't a summary of Calvinism (as you mention in your first footnote), it's a summary of the differences between Calvinism and Arminianism. It's quite an annoying summary in that it is simultaneously very successful memetically, and rather flawed factually. For example, Arminius also believed in Total Depravity (and was undecided on the Perseverance of the Saints), but most Calvinists assume he didn't, because it's in TULIP.

Sad to hear parental choice wasn't a factor with the previous ministers. I'm sure that will all be fixed by this new batch of ministers!

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Thank you for the expansions and clarifications! I'm glad I didn't get too many things wrong about Arminiasm. :-)

I appreciate your point about TULIP not summarising all of Calvinism but rather how it differs from Arminiasm. I guess 'distinctive features that differ from mainstream Protestantism' is also fairly accurate.

I wouldn't hold your breath on future Ministers!

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