in an iPod world

A review of Knowing Christ Today

"Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge" (Dallas Willard)

I read "Knowing Christ Today", a book written by Dallas Willard who is a Professor of Philosophy at University of Southern California on my flight back from Sweden yesterday. Drawing on the writing of Plato, Aristotle, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Berger and CS. Lewis and invoking the image of Bonhoeffer, Mother Teresa, Kierkegaard, he discusses what it means to "know" spiritual reality of Christ in this pluralistic world. With a rare mix of intellectual integrity and the passionate conviction of personal faith, he lucidly deals with complex issues that many Christians (or any one who's is interested in spirituality and religion) are facing today. His discussion on the relationship between Christian Gospel and Christian pluralism offers a hopeful way going forward and serious intellectual and spiritual challenge to both Christian (conservative and progressive alike) and non-Christians. If you are in for faith and religion, and their relationship with knowledge and plurality, I strongly recommend this one for you.

re-imgainging as an act of design

As I am re-reading Designing Design for my class, I came to the following passage from the first chapter, What is Design?, of the book.

Today's designers are beginning to realize that endless possibilities for design lie dormant not just in the new situations brought on by technology, but also in the common circumstances of our daily lives. Creation of novel things is not the only creativity. The sensibility that allows one to rediscover the unknown in the familiar is equally creative. We hold a great accumulation of culture in our own hands, yet we remain unaware of its value. The ability to make use of these cultural assets as a virgin resource is no less creative than the ability to produce something out of nothing. Beneath our feet lies a gigantic, untouched vein of ore. Just as simply donning sunglasses makes the world look fresher to us, there is an unlimited number of ways of looking at things, and most of them haven't been discovered yet. To awaken and activate those new ways of perceiving things is to enrich our cognitive faculty, and this relates to the enrichment of the relationship between objects and human beings. Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life. Designers who have inherited the legacy of modernism and shoulder the new century have gradually begun to explore their consciousness of that fact.

Well said.

Soloist -- the Movie

I read the book, Soloist, last year and was greatly moved and touched by the story. So, when I heard that they were movie making out of the book, I was excited. Finally, after many weeks of resistance, my wife relented and borrowed it from RedBox (by the way, there is an interesting story on RedBox on New York Times today.) She is a cellist and does not like movies featuring cello as they generally do not represent cello-playing accurately. This was not an exception -- after seeing the trailer, she was already disappointed and refused to watch it. Until yesterday, although she did not finish watching it.

After watching the movie, I was quite disappointed by the movie. The storytelling was flat, failing to bring the richness of the original story as represented in the book. The cellist from the LA Philharmonics was depicted as a comical figure at best, although in the book, the cellist was represented as a much more thoughtful person. I am not sure which one is a true representation and how the cellist feels about his character in the movie. Furthermore, even though I am not a musician, I was disappointed that the actor who played Mr. Ayer did not bother to learn the most basic posture and fingering techniques for cello playing. At the basic minimum, he should have tried vibrato when he plays cello. After all, Mr. Ayers went to Juilliard and I cannot imagine Juilliard letting anyone in who can't do vibrato properly! In fact, when I saw real Mr. Ayers playing cello, I felt that he was overdoing his vibrato. So, it was obvious the actor did not study Mr. Ayers and his cello playing enough. I was however moved by the fact that the movie actually had people at the Lamp Community.

So, for those who haven't watched the movie, I would recommend to get a copy of the book instead. You will never know how Mr. Ayers met Yo-Yo Ma at the end of the book, if you only watch the movie.

Books that we are reading in my Scientific Inquiry of Management Research

These are the books that we will be using as main textbooks for this semester.

The followings are the books that we read partially.