How does a sheep know their shepherd? By their shepherd’s voice. How does the believer know God is their shepherd and Jesus The Christ their Good Shepherd? By every experience they have directly in time, space, causality, and substance. They hear, they feel, they see the master. The sheep just knows. Watch a sheep hear his shepherd’s voice. He doesn’t have to be told. He just knows. There’s no grand revelation, no ecstatic moment, no church bells tolling Hallelujah, no choirs of heavenly angels singing loud Hosannas — and no Late Parrots (reference) — just plain, very practical experience directly with the point of its origin.
Belief
Understanding
Learning
Data
When you believe you can understand. When you understand you can learn. When you learn you will have data. You cannot get from data to learning. You cannot get from learning to understanding. You cannot get from understanding to belief. It all goes the other way, epistemologically speaking.
Praying for this or that is dangerous. Which one of us knows what is good for us? Which one of us knows our past, our present, or our future? Best it is simply to take what comes without grousing, pray to always be devoted to God, and then do what we wish to do. What we plan to do and do is more important than what we want and pray for.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov:
Staged Incidents As The Western
Approach To Doing Politics
Bondarchuck’s War And Peace is also available complete on three discs from Criterion, with English subtitles. Total run time is about seven hours. So many things strike me from this movie, are evoked in me by it. A salient feeling is how Russian leaders today talk the same values and uprightness Tolstoy has in the mouths of his characters. Feeling and thought are united. The movie makes you feel Russia, Holy Russia, her soul, how she thinks of herself. Russians are Russian. Thank God for them. It is taking me over a week now to watch the movie. Just too much to contemplate, to learn. The director and cinematographer love trees and wind making them move.
The face and bosom of the temptress are unforgettable, the actress can say it all without words. The famous ballroom scene, wherein Andrei comes to ask Natasha to dance, opens with Natasha and her father ascending the very long staircase with multiple landings and red carpet that Putin ascends in a video of one of his inaugurations. It may be a set in the movie, but it is a set of a real building. Altogether just too much to write about. The Moscow burning scenes are terrifying.
Lavrov, Putin, and Zakharova frequently use the word objective with respect to something they are doing, describing, or intending. I suspect this reflects a Russian epistemological habit of taking everything very seriously for what it is and avoiding fantasies. Martyanov’s discourses reflect this habit of mind. Bondarchuck’s masterpiece exhibits the same approach to reality: that it is very real. The movie also reminds me of Kandinsky and his love of strong colors masterfully juxtaposed as if to make a fugue. I see this color sense today in pictures of Moscow. Kandinsky says the light in Moscow is very beautiful and like nowhere else.
I am so very grateful President Putin has compelled us, compelled me, to see Russia as very real and to take her very seriously and affectionately. All my life I have wanted to be able to do that and was told I was crazy and wrong and would be repulsed if I knew what Russians are really like. So many years later, with so few years left, I get to do that and rue to find out that what I was told was wrong and not true.
Bondarchuck’s masterpiece is worth having and viewing in whole.
Principle I
Principle II
Principle III
By Artists M and F Graham
At Puttaparthi, Andhra Pradesh, India
