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Wow. What a sentence :) Someone has a way with words.

With that, it's official: Bobko Bobkovich Bobkonov is my favorite Russian.

@AntV

Proverbs 15:1

A soft answer turneth away wrath: But grievous words stir up anger.

He's certainly consistent.

Mind you, in real life he could be a German-speaking Croatian Roman Catholic priest, half Albanian and living in Turkey.

KJV! Old school :) Are you quite sure you're an atheist?

@GefreiterKania

Haha! Yeah, I'm thinking "atheist" is a Russian code word for Southern Baptist. :D

....I actually bet on it! :)

@jon357

:D:D

:D

....no chance for another pagan for the forum then....oh well!

*takes helmet and goes for Abendbrot*

@Bratwurst Boy

Poor guy! At least there's abendbrot!

Pssst....what's abendbrot? A bratwurst?

...und Brot und Käse! :)

The only way to read the Bible, IMHO. No Standard Revised Version for this atheist.

I actually only became familiar with the Bible through college. At Columbia we're very proud of something we call the "Core Curriculum", which is basically a quick walkthrough of Western Civilization's foundations. We start with the Iliad, go on to Plato and Socrates, then the Aeniad, Cassius Dio, etc. From there, it's a quick jump to Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Dante. Then comes my favorite part with Montaigne, Rousseau, Vico, Hume, Smith, Hobbes, Luther. It keeps going through Hegels and Kants, but the key is that to be able to read any of it and make sense of it, you typically need a good working understanding of the Bible. Otherwise all the allusions, allegories, etc don't make sense (even Yerofeev, is inaccessible without the Bible, Kania). So that is where we start typically, and then always come back to through the first two years of study. Many, many hours spent debating scripture between Jews, orthodox, Catholics, Muslims. This truly was special.

As literature, the Bible is the greatest achievement of mankind. Just because it's written by people with a ridiculous outlook by my standards, doesn't mean I can't appreciate the enormous depth of wisdom in the proverbs or the beatitudes.

We also read the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, and the Annals of Confucius.

The Authorised Version.

Still the best, and as important as Shakespeare to the development of modern English.

And it doesn't mention Serbia anywhere.

Oh, that's VERY good to hear! Those type of core curriculums are falling out of fashion.

@AntV

No need to pay crazy money, the whole reading list is accessible online. What's missing of course is the classroom discussion, but that can be overcome if one is curious enough:

college.columbia.edu/core/core

@AntV

Re: being currently unfashionable, ours was created more than a century ago in the wake of the shock of The Great War. Our campus has two prominent monuments to students that died in WWI. Our graduates contributed a disproportionate amount of officers to the American war effort. Thousands died. Whatever they call a Core Curriculum in the rest of America has nothing to do with ours, though it served as the template for many other such programs at other places.

Is any great literature really accessible without the Bible? And I am impressed indeed with your core curriculum :)


I certainly agree, although some modern translations are quite all right (NKJV and ESV are my favourites). The closest Polish equivalent to KJV is BG/UBG (Uwspółcześniona/Biblia Gdańska) - based on Textus Receptus and, especially in New Testament, practically equivalent to KJV. Be careful though not to confuse UBG with NBG (Nowa Biblia Gdańska) which is one of the weirdest translations I have ever come across.


What? I thought it started with: "In the beginning there was nothing, only God strolling through the streets of Belgrade".

Imagine my disappointment when I sit with my family of Moscow State University graduates and still feel like the stupidest person in the room. You should see the historical reading list for people that graduated from the faculty of Political-Economy at Moscow State. Somehow, the people in the Kremlin didn't worry about how these people read their books and how they discussed it. After seeing the result of my education at Columbia my father was left only with bitter disappointment.

Damn, this story is even more scary than Velund's nuke threats! Now I seriously think that we stand no chance against Russia. ;)

@Bobko

Thanks for the link. When I went into college that type of curriculum was what I was looking for. I had to sort of create it myself with the help of a few good profs- the beauty of the independent study course.

I had a certain affinity for Columbia because of Mark van Doren and Thomas Merton.

I thought Columbia started to abandon or dilute this curriculum, I must have mistaken it for another school. Glad to hear it's still alive. I might encourage my kids to give it a look-see. Plus, you still have a guy like McWhorter teaching there, so that's a plus.

For modern translations I favour the JB. A little dated but very clear English. That and JB Phillips.


To be fair, it does mention Istanbul quite a lot. They even named s book of it after Galata.

@GefreiterKania

Now think about the Chinese and Indian universities with 0.1% acceptance rates.

Agghhhh, sh!t! I guess I won't encourage the spawn of my loin to look at Columbia afterall.

Moscow State, you say? That could cause some serious consternation for my father-in-law. Any ither suggestions?

:)


I will worry about India and China when they produce their Augustine, Shakespeare or Einstein. Hmm... or maybe they did but it hasn't been translated. When I think about the amount of literature that must be published every year in Hindi or Mandarin... 0_0

@AntV

Still ranks behind dozens of American and British colleges according to current rankings published :(

Now the Times have stopped even including them in their annual ranking. The reason we get a low score typically is because of the publication rate. Not enough being translated into English and published in journals like The Lancet, Nature, etc.

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Those rankings can kiss my ass, Bobko Bobkovich. I guarantee you someone with the wide breadth of reading and thinking about the works you were exposed to has a greater capacity to think critically by inferring a broader base of reference than your grad from some high-ranker polytech.

I saw a program about a highly esteemed techincal university in India that educates its students in various tech disciplines. They are brilliant engineers, but about as creative and imaginative as a Saharan pond.

Way less than anyone would even expect.


I was recently on an "official" visit to a university in one of the Arabic speaking parts of Africa. It was a prestigious university according to people in that country.

The library for the whole university was on the level of a village library in Britain or even smaller than that. The literature section was literally one bookcase.

Kania and Bobko

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And me:

Hermiona from Porry Hatter?