Ken Martin's Blog

In this article discussing To Kill a Mockingbird via PowerLine, I found this paragraph interesting: > There is a gauzy and middlebrow sentimentality in the book [To Kill a Mockingbird], and a naïveté about human nature, luxuries we perhaps feel we can no longer afford. We are all too aware of how the righteous hatred of hatred can degenerate into an even more poisonous and manipulable form of hate, precisely because it is insulated from self-examination by its own sense of righteousness. The comment on self-examination is what struck me. Self-examination in the light of Scripture is something I'm familiar with, but the concept of self-examination solidified in a different way when I heard it discussed from a different perspective at a local conference some time ago.

Both the Minneapolis Martins and the South Carolina Martins will appreciate this. :)

My lovely bride has a fantastic series of posts concerning a short, traumatic event which happened recently. Don't miss it. :)

Kenny and I got to go see Disney's rendition of C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in Chronicles of Narnia. He didn't want to at first. He's read all the books, some more than once. But he knew from the commercials that some of the scarier characters looked, well, scary! I kept good-naturedly needling him to go until finally he asked "Papa, why should I go and have those images in my head?" Oh... uh... good point. Great. Now I've got a kid who it turns out has actually listened to me and values the sovereignty of his imagination over that of the director.

Reading was fun tonight. It was nice to have my brain start to see things, albeit with help. I can start to see what I don't know. Maybe that sounds weird. What I mean is I am starting to recognize enough to say "I know what that is supposed to be, but I don't know that form yet." I really need to get a better handle on vocab, though. It's not much good figuring out how a word is to work in a sentence, but not knowing what it means.

Notes from tonight: I must nail the full paradigm of definite articles. And I need to remember the definite articles on the vocab cards, since I can't just figure out the gender of third declension words.

Assignments:

• Read Chapter 11
• Chapter 11 Vocab
• Workbook: Pg 33 parse odds
• Workbook: Pg 34 translate 1-5
• Memorize 1st and 2nd person personal pronoun paradigms
• Memorize πας paradigm

Preview (what we need to understand) from this chapter:

• Memorization noted above
• The difference between accented and unaccented pronouns
• How the case of a pronoun is determined
• How the person of a pronoun is determined
• How the gender of a pronoun is determined
• Distinctives of dentals in the 3rd declension

Book Recommendations:

• D. Hagner, Matthew, two volumes by Word
• W. D. Davies & D. Allison A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Matthew, three volumes by ICC
• R. Gundry, Matthew: A Commentary on his Handbook for a Mixed Church Under Persecution
• R. Guelich, Sermon on the Mount: A foundation for Understanding

...eating any kind of food and shunning exercise. Helen's blogging on how.

No, I haven't lost an arm or something.

It really is true that a huge part of learning a language is the habit of it. It's repetition which makes this data I'm trying to assimilate accessible when I need it. And it's neglect which allows it to get buried with all the other cares and tasks and happenings of the day. And after a few days, it's hard to dig it back out.

This shouldn't be surprising to me after learning programming languages from Lasso to JSP to Javascript to PHP and so on. I think the difference between a programming language and Koine Greek (a dead language) is that I can experiment with programming languages and get instant feedback and instant gratification. Failure in a programming language can be an annoying but benign null pointer error. Failure in Greek can be heresy.

As I'm learning the third declension nouns, I'm feeling like I don't have the first and second declensions solid enough yet. Which just piles on the stress. I know them, but they're not "at the ready" like I want them to be. Maybe I'm just being impatient.

Will that stop me? μη γενοιτο! Heck, four months ago, the word declension scared me. :)

• "Can I have another mocha?"
• "I don't know where the bag of Skittles went!"
• "I'll shoot you with my laser eyes like this..."

Helen often wakes up to the alarm playing the soundtrack CD from Sophie's Choice. It's nice, gentle, a little wistful.

Anyway, when she wasn't looking, I cranked up iTunes, copied the CD, and made a new one with the first song the same as always (to give her that sense of familiarity), but the second song was this annoying little tune from an old Sherlock Holmes movie. I warn you, if you listen, it will stubbornly lodge itself in your head. Even singing it like Bob Dylan won't get it out.

Assignments:

• Read Chapter 10
• Chapter 10 Vocab
• Memorize σαρχ paradigm
• Workbook: Pg 31 chart
• Workbook: Pg 31 parse odds
• Workbook: Pgs 32-33 translate 1-5

Book Recommendations:

• H. Alford The Greek New Testament 7th Ed. (number one pick, more technical greek)
• W. R. Nicell The Expositor's Greek Testament
• I. H. Marshall New International Greek Testament Commentary
• G. Fee New International Commentary of the New Testament (number two pick, more homiletic/application)

To my fellow Lackian followers, you can view just the "Greek Class" category here (you can bookmark that, too).