Institutionalized: The Beginning
A long time ago on here I mused about reading through Calvin’s Institutes and posting a sort of blow by blow account of my impressions.
Then for a long time nothing happened.
Until now.
I have in my possession a copy of Volume I of Institutes on loan from the Brooks’ library, so now there’s really no reason not to have a gander at this thing and blog thoughts on it. Brooks himself has it on his Kindle so I believe his plan is to follow along as well. My initial idea for doing this had a pair of underpinnings, loosely they are as follows:
- I have been raised in and currently attend churches that are part of the Calvinist tradition – yet I don’t know what the man wrote, only distillations of it.
- Like many (if not most) widely-invoked yet less-widely-read figures, I have this sense that Calvin might be different from what his followers make him out to be.
I don’t know what I’m going to get out of this. Complete rejection of Calvin? Embrace? Something else entirely? Your guess is as good as mine. Anyway, my hope is that I can as honest as possible with my thought process as I tackle this project.
One final note, I created “Institutionalized” as a separate category so that anyone follow along with this series of posts quite easily. My goal as of right now is to post, say, once a week or so. We’ll see how that goes.
I’ve read large chunks of Calvin’s Institutes but have not read the whole thing. I’m tempted to follow along… how are you thinking of dividing up the reading?
Ditto that question.
Ditto.
One week-sized chunk per week? Depends how busy work is/how much the puppy demands I entertain her, and so on and so on. I don’t think it’s any more masochistic than Challies’ abandoned plan to read every bestseller in a year.
He abandoned that?
As long as it’s a reasonable amount, I’m in. That is, with reasonable being arbitrarily defined by me.
I planned to read all of Proust and McCarthy last year. Oh well.
And ditto what Brooks said about me defining what is reasonable.