Shadowing Practice: Reading and the art of conversation - Learn English Speaking with Video
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352 sentences
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Well, good afternoon.
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It is a, another cold day here in the great state of Michigan.
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I'm not sure why people say that.
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I'm not sure if one state is any better than the other.
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Michigan just seems to be colder than most.
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one thing for sure it is very difficult to clench a pipe that is a church warden in your teeth
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it almost pulls your teeth out I am smoking my estate church warden there's no name on this I bought this pipe
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probably 12 to 15 years ago.
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Maybe a little bit longer than that.
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No, it would be longer.
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I had this back in 2004.
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So this is almost 20 years old.
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And it was old then.
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It's been a great smoker.
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I love church warden pipes.
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mainly because they remind me of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
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It's much smaller than my other one that I had picked up.
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This one was from a guy in Romania and you can kind of see the size difference here.
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This definitely is much more of one of those long Hobbit pipes.
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I mean you can't hardly get the whole thing in the frame.
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This is very cool smoking.
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As the smoke comes up it's very cool.
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But this one itself is cool.
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I am smoking some
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One Kool -Aid in it, trying to aromatize my books.
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Years ago when I was in college, I had a guy that lit me some books.
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and when I picked the books up you could smell the vanilla pipe tobacco in them
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and I thought I want to have a library someday that where all the books smell like vanilla or cherry pipe tobacco.
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I think most of mine is more vanilla and I have a couple aromatics that are cherry flavor.
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I don't get around to smoking them as much, but yeah, I'm drinking out of my Orvis cup,
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some hot cider, kind of relaxing downstairs.
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As I said, it's a very cold day here this weekend.
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I think it's been cold all over the United States.
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This weekend, we had one of of those
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Arctic blasts that came down.
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So we didn't get as much snow, maybe six inches, which is not too bad for us.
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But we did get the cold.
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It was on Saturday when I got up.
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It was minus 23, minus 8 on Sunday.
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And I think today is Monday.
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Yes, today is Monday.
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It was 7 when I got up.
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So we're moving in the right direction.
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Highs today are, I think, around 20.
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Maybe it's more in the teens.
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It got up to about 20 this weekend.
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But I think by the end of the week, we're supposed to maybe get back in the mid -30s.
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I'll be glad whenever winter is over.
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The sad thing about it is that even though it's the 26th of January,
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we're only 22 weeks away from fall.
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Just a depressing thought if you think about it.
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You're just 22 weeks.
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That's all it is.
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22 weekends and we will be in September.
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Winter will be over.
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Spring will be gone and summer will be over.
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It's just amazing how fast time flies.
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I've always liked the same years, months, and weeks are long, but years are quick.
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And that is so true.
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Last year, in August, I think I mentioned I went down for my 40th high school reunion.
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And you think about it, it's like an entire life has gone by.
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I've raised two kids.
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I've had two grandkids in that particular period of time.
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I mean, a lot has transpired.
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But in reality, that was only the celebration of 40 Christmases, 40 Thanksgivings.
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And 40 of something doesn't really seem like that much
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but it's just it's odd how time how we experience time
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you look back it seems quick you look forward it seems like it'll never end
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or never arrive and as a kid you wait for Christmas
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or wait for a birthday
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or for summer for school to be out in summer to be here
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and it seemed like it just it never was there
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but then when you're enjoying yourself it seems as though it goes by in an instant so it it's all about perspective.
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You just kind of chug through day by day and then you look back and you think, man, where did 40 years go?
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So it's interesting things to think about.
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I have since it's winter, it's always a good time to put my pipe back up here.
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It's always a good time to stay inside and read.
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Summer, I seem to have a lot of things outside to go, to do, to go and do.
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But I'm, as I mentioned last time, I set my reading schedule.
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And that reading schedule this year is going to include a particular study.
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I am reading, rereading Mere Christianity.
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This is by C .S.
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Lewis.
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And Lewis died mid -20th century.
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He, I think it was right before I was born, he passed away.
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It is a seminal work.
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People quote it.
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It really is a study on the moral law, the whole concept of morality.
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Where do we get the basis for saying that something is right and wrong?
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How can we even determine right from wrong?
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And he uses that as an argument.
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I've listened to the book a few times on audio.
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I've read it a couple times and I remember reading it whenever I was about 19.
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I first started college.
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I was at Northeast State.
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It's a junior college at the time
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and one of the professors that I was friends with gave it to him and said, read this book.
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So I did, but I've read it since then, and I'm rereading it as the beginning of reading a lot of Lewis's books again.
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Some I haven't read, Abolition of Man.
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I've owned it, but I've never actually read it.
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It is one of his more dense books.
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People describe it as being much more philosophical than mere Christianity.
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Mere Christianity was a series of lectures that he gave, and it's very relatable, very easy to read.
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He kind of, as one person said, brings the cookies off the shelf, makes it very easy for people to understand.
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Abolition of Man is a little bit more difficult, but if you get through it, if you understand the concept of it,
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which really he's in, Abolition of Man, it's kind of really in the idea of do do things have value?
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Is value something that is intrinsic?
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It is something that is that is real?
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Or is it something that we merely ascribe?
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If I look at a sunset and I say that's a beautiful sunset, can I say that it actually is a beautiful sunset?
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Or is it just my opinion that makes it a beautiful sunset?
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The sunset that itself is neither good nor bad.
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It's just a reality.
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What is value comes from, whether it's beautiful or not beautiful, is myself.
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And Lewis would say that there is inherent value in things himself.
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There is, I think we could translate that into absolute truth.
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In philosophy, they would describe that as the difference between foundationalism and non -foundationalism.
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And this relates to the study of knowledge or epistemology.
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Non -foundationalism says there really is no absolute truth.
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Foundationalism says there are absolute truths.
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I wish I had a bigger bowl.
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My hands were cold.
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But it's nice holding the warm bowl there.
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But in foundation, they would say, yes, there are absolutes.
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And it doesn't matter who you are, when you live.
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There are always absolute truths.
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One example of foundationalism, I think, would be in mathematics.
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While it may be, I would say, in some ways fashionable or correct.
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And it's not, I don't think, very widespread for people to say, well, well, 2 plus 2 does not always equal 4.
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1 plus 1 does not always equal 2.
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Well, I think it always does.
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It is a universal truth that if you have one apple, you add another apple to it, you've got two apples.
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It's common sense.
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When I was in school, I took a class on advanced mathematics, and we actually spent a whole day,
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one period, one class time, just proving that.
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And in fact, you can prove it.
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It takes like a whole page to prove one plus one does equal two.
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It's just a logical truth.
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Now, where things get kind of dicey in people saying we believe in non -foundational truth, that there really is no truth,
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usually comes in more in the area of ethics.
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Well, that relates to kind of what, you know, if you have foundational truth, there really is absolute truth.
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you can build upon it as I think
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Lewis does in Mere Christianity where he's going to be talking about the law of morality or the moral law.
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How do we know what is right and what is wrong?
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So there is a moral law that all people possess and we can agree on that for the most part.
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There may be some some differences.
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There may be individuals that are outliers.
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There may be some cultures, very very few cultures, that are outliers.
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But you can't take the outlier, the extreme case and say that proves the norm.
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So it's interesting looking at those two books, how Lewis is kind of building a foundation in a sense in the abolition of man,
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and then he's going up to the idea of the moral law, which he uses all throughout mere Christianity.
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So those are at least two books I'm reading.
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I'm also going to read a couple more of his, but But I have another one that I'm starting to read,
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and this one is called Beyond the Wager.
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Not a long read.
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It's maybe almost 200 pages, I think, or maybe 150.
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What is this?
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It's actually 200 pages exactly.
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Beyond the Wager, and this is kind of the life of Blaise Pascal.
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Now, Pascal was a scientist, but he was also a Christian,
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and he made the wager of, well, you can live as though Christianity is not true,
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but is it worth the wager?
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You're wagering eternal life with whether you actually know for sure that God does not exist.
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Now, Doug Routice is the one who wrote this book, and he says sometimes we have misunderstood what this wager actually is.
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Is that what Blaise Pascal is saying?
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Is he just simply saying it's better to live your life with Christian ideals and be wrong in the end,
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rather than not do it, and be right in the end, or rather than not do it and be wrong in the end.
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So he goes a little bit more in detail.
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I've read through about a third of it so far.
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And the beginning part, he just kind of gives a history of who Pascal was, his early life, his thought.
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Sickly man.
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He was a person who struggled with his health.
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but a very interesting thinker scientifically even philosophically and theologically so this is one I would definitely recommend late
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Beyond the Wager by Douglas Gruthyce he's written a lot of other books he wrote a huge book
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that is actually right here on my shelf that's about 1600 pages, more of a defense of Christianity.
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So looking at issues such as kind of what C .S.
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Lewis, we're basing a lot of this on C .S.
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Lewis, related to argument for the moral law,
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historicity of the resurrection, just some of the philosophical foundations of Christianity.
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So it's a very, very thinking book.
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One of the things I like about the church world is I can actually just point to it right there.
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So it's nice to have that pointer.
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yeah, I'm looking forward to getting through some of these books.
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One, again, Abolition Man for the first time.
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He does have another
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The Weight of Glory and Screwtape Letters.
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Those are not ones I'm going to read at this particular point,
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but I do want to go back and read what I hear people call the Narniad, which is the Chronicles Narnia.
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Lewis wrote that.
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It was written as a children's book, but it actually has an underlying theme within that, a spiritual theme.
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And then there's a medieval theme that goes beyond that.
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Dr. Michael Ward, who is over at Oxford University,
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he wrote a book in 2008 that was called Planet Narnia.
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And he said if you look at the underlying, underlying organization of those seven books that make up the Chronicles of Narnia,
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they relate to the seven planets.
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Well, not all planets.
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One is the sun.
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But it relates to the cosmology of the medieval period, medieval philosophy.
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And it makes sense because Lewis, as well as Tolkien, who wrote
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The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, they were both medievalist.
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Modern movement had already been coming along back in the 1670s,
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even 1800s with the whole modernism and the Enlightenment.
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But they both claim we still think kind of as medievalist.
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And that's a different perspective, even though they taught at Oxford and Cambridge.
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They both appreciated the literature of the medieval period.
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And they use it kind of pulling that forward.
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I think Lewis probably more than Tolkien.
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Tolkien's was an amazing story.
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I do like
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The Lord of the Rings.
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If you've seen the movies, you know a little bit about it.
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But if you've read the books, you'll know that the books have a much different take on the actual story.
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And it makes sense to me.
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I mean, you are making a book you can't go through everything in a movie.
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I mean, you're making a movie, so you can't do everything in the book, in the movie, or it could be a 30 -hour movie.
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Although I would not be against that.
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I have been shocked.
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We were at the 25th anniversary release of the Lord of the Rings movies.
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And I think within the first five years, they came out, 10 years, they came out with the extended versions.
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I really thought for the 20th anniversary, they would have come out with the extended, extended versions.
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You know, extended versions, I mean, they're already three to three and a half hours long. But I could watch
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The Lord of the Rings for four to five hours.
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So if they had extra stuff, I would love to do that.
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It'd be great if he could have put in the Tom Bombadil stuff.
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That would be, I would love that.
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But I have heard that there was talk, and this just maybe talk
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that for the 30th anniversary he is going to release a extended extended version now i don't know how much
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that will be or even if that's true we'll we'll see
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when that comes out but um i'm i am reading uh i'm going to be reading the chronicles nardia again
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and i love the way tolkien uses words i mean even though it's a children's story um
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I don't know of an adult who couldn't get something out of it.
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It's just, it's fun reading.
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It's not like reading children's literature today.
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Some children's literature you pick up, and it's like, this sounds like it was written for an eight -year -old.
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Whereas for Tolkien, he kind of spans the ages.
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When my kids were growing up, there was a cartoon series called the Animaniacs.
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I don't know if you remember that.
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The Animaniacs, there was a, it's about four cartoon, three or four cartoon characters, and there was another, seemed like it was associated with it.
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I think it was part of it, and it had Pinky and the Brain, or Inky and the Brain.
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And my kids would watch Animaniacs, and even Pinky and the Brain, I think it was.
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I would watch it with them, because I didn't have anything else to do.
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but I noticed that the humor was actually geared toward adults.
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Not in a bad way, but it just had subtle hints there that it would keep your attention.
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It was like, my goodness, what he just said completely went over my kid's head.
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But that hit me.
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And you could tell the people that wrote it were pretty good at their job.
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But the Chronicles of Narnia read very much like that.
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I think adult could enjoy them. And I'm also reading
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The Lord of the Rings again.
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trying to look at the what is called literary apologetics
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and a lot of people take George MacDonald who was kind of the an influencer in Lewis
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and in Tolkien or on Lewis and talking
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but they will look at Lewis's fiction such as his the trilogy the Ransom trilogy and and Carol Landria,
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I believe it is called, and the Lord of the Rings.
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And they'll say these are literary.
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It's apologetics in a literary format.
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So looking forward to going back to them.
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I'm through the first book.
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So I'm about at the Two Towers.
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And completing that one, I'm hoping, by the end of February.
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At least I hope so, because I have other readings that I'm going to need to be starting.
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I have some Augustine.
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I want to read some of his stuff.
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Trying to put in a yearly reading schedule here.
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But yeah, if you've ever read C .S.
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Lewis, Mere Christianity, or Abolition of Man, or you know much about Pascal or Beyond the Wager,
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Love to hear your comments on those particular books.
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But we can share some stuff as I jump into, especially the abolition of man.
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I like the way he starts out by kind of critiquing a school book at his time,
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the Green School Book, and where they take two individuals where they actually look at a, say here's two opinions on something.
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They say it doesn't really matter what their opinions are on the beauty of something it's just all subjective and then
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Lewis kind of takes that apart.
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I know that can be a pretty divisive thing.
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Now, people in art, if you're an art critic you would say that yes there are absolutes,
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but if you're another person you say well I can go to a museum
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and I like certain things and I don't like certain things.
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I believe what
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Lewis would be referring to are things that we could all agree on.
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Of course, then again some may find that to be problematic.
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Do we all agree on on the beauty of a sunset, the beauty of a sunrise,
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a mountainscape, or a weather kind of landscape that you you can see.
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So it's always interesting discussion and if you can read those kind of things you can smoke a pipe,
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you can drink some coffee, some Irish cream liqueur, hard cider,
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or hot apple cider, or maybe even some whiskey, which is great to dialogue and to interact with some of these people.
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Of course, I love dialoguing with actual people.
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That's kind of fun, too.
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It's rare today that we can do that.
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I know I've mentioned that a couple times.
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It just seems as though we have lost the ability to have a conversation with each other.
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I've had conversations with people who are staunch atheists, people who are in a variety of other religious movements.
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And I love hearing what they have to say.
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I love dialoguing with people and just saying,
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hey, let's you know we always agree to disagree um on some of these philosophical issues but um
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i think it's always good to push our own beliefs um
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because when you dialogue with someone who disagrees with you
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if you can do that in a way where there is dialogue
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and it's not someone just shouting at you don't get that i don't like people just shouting at me and
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it seems a lot of people today shout and it's almost as though if I if I say it loud enough
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I can speak truth I think what people are doing
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I think a lot of people have the emotional level of a 12 year old and they shout
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their thoughts at other people and it may be more that they're trying to convince themselves that at the right,
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but it usually is done in such a such a disrespectful and almost nonsensical way.
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I don't see really what you're going to gain out of this.
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I don't see how you're going to learn or even communicate by the way that you're conducting yourself.
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But that's an entirely different subject as to where we are in the 21st century
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and how people act in the 21st century.
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A lot of this is just the culture in
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which we live in and the culture that has kind of evolved over the last 20 or 30 years.
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I don't find a lot of reason in some of the things that people say.
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I believe it, and you can ask, why do you believe it?
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I just believe it because I believe it.
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And I thought, well, that's a circular argument.
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If I say I believe certain things about my worldview, I should be able to back those things up.
314
And I'm teaching a course right now on world religions.
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I know there's a big disagreement whether you smoke the dawdle or not, but I'm going to.
316
just a little bit more.
317
I'm teaching a class on world religions, and it's been interesting and challenging the people in the class because we kind of present,
318
here's what this particular religious ideology proposes.
319
And when we're done, I would say, okay, show me if I am going to hold this position where I'm wrong.
320
And I kind of play the devil's advocate, and I will play an advocate for that particular position.
321
And it's fun, the dialogue that we have.
322
But I found in society that you can ask people, can you argue the position that you're against?
323
So if you believe in abortion, can you argue against abortion?
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If you believe in pro -life, can you argue the other side?
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Most people cannot do that.
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They cannot take themselves objectively outside of their position and say,
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let me put myself in the other person's position and be able to argue against that.
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And I think we need to do that.
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Because if I cannot take the opposite of what I believe and argue against my position, I don't really know if my position is correct then.
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Can it stand up to scrutiny?
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and I need to be able to reason through that.
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One, not only does that allow me to reinforce what I believe and say, okay, I know why I believe what I believe,
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but it helps you not look like a fool when you get out and someone asks you a question and it's like, I don't know.
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I think we need to have at least some understanding of why we believe what we believe.
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So anyways, this video has gone on way too long.
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We're at almost 30 minutes here.
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So you have a blessed day.
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I hope that you're staying warm.
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I know this cold front has gone all the way down to Texas, and there's a lot of people that are hurting.
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I just heard that in Nashville this weekend, they were without power.
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And I have a lot of people I know that are just below that in North Alabama.
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They didn't get that much.
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It didn't seem like it disrupted things but you know quarter inch of ice
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that means power's out that that can hurt people i don't i don't want
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that to happen um minus 23 was bad enough here
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but um at least we continue to have power
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so i hope wherever you are you are warm safe
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and uh i i hope to see you very soon try to make these videos more often
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i know i say that a lot i don't quite get that done
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but i think in the coming weeks
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i'm going to have a lot more time on my hands to to be able to do that so
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So, God bless you and take care.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Reading and the art of conversation”. This video has 352 sentences and 4049 words to shadow. The speech runs for 29:04. The speaker talks at a steady 139 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| pipe noun | /ˈpaɪp/ | A wind instrument consisting of a tube, often lined with holes to allow for adjustment in pitch, sounded by blowing into the tube. |
| wage noun | /weɪd͡ʒ/ | An amount of money paid to a worker for a specified quantity of work, usually calculated on an hourly basis and expressed in an amount of money per hour. |
| abolition noun | /ˌæb.əˈlɪʃ.ən/ | The act of abolishing; an annulling; abrogation. |
| extend verb | /ɛkˈstɛnd/ | To increase in extent. |
| dialogue noun | /ˈdaɪəˌlɑɡ/ | A conversation or other form of discourse between two or more individuals. |
| mere adjective | /mɪɚ/ | Just, only; no more than, pure and simple, neither more nor better than might be expected. |
| sunset noun | /ˈsʌnˌsɛt/ | The moment each evening when the sun disappears below the western horizon. |
| argue verb | /ˈɑɹ.ɡju/ | To show grounds for concluding (that); to indicate, imply. |
| moral adjective | /ˈmoɹəl/ | Of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behaviour, especially conforming to principles of rectitude. |
| relate verb | /ɹɪˈleɪt/ | To tell in a descriptive way. |
| shout verb | /ʃaʊt/ | To utter a sudden and loud cry, as in joy, triumph, exultation or anger, or to attract attention, to animate others, etc. |
| medieval adjective | /mɪdˈi.vəl/ | Of or relating to the Middle Ages, the period from approximately 500 to 1500 AD. |
| chronicle noun | /ˈkɹɑnɪkl̩/ | A written account of events and when they happened, ordered by time. |
| literary adjective | /ˈlɪt.(ə.)ɹə.ɹi/ | Relating to literature. |
| underlying adjective | Lying underneath. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come out verb | /ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/ | To be discovered; to be revealed. |
| come out with verb | To say (something) unexpectedly. | |
| get through verb | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | To overcome; to endure. |
| get up verb | To move in an upward direction; to ascend or climb. | |
| look back verb | To think of (past events) in retrospect (in hindsight). | |
| look forward to verb | To anticipate, expect, or wait for, especially with a feeling of approval or pleasure; to be excited or eager to. | |
| pick up verb | To lift; to grasp and raise. | |
| back up verb | To move backwards, especially for a vehicle to do so. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I'm not sure why people say that.
- I'll be glad whenever winter is over.
- How can we even determine right from wrong?
- I've owned it, but I've never actually read it.
- How do we know what is right and what is wrong?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if you've read the books, you'll know · if they had extra stuff, I would love · if that's true we'll we |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | It's been · I've always liked · has gone |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was born · is called · was written |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | inches, which is · one who wrote · person who struggled |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 92 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, don't, I've. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, ethics /ˈɛθ.ɪks/, atheist /ˈeɪ.θi.ɪst/, thinker /ˈθɪŋ.kɚ/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: abolition /ˌæb.əˈlɪʃ.ən/, shout /ʃaʊt/, abortion /əˈbɔɹ.ʃn̩/, shelf /ʃɛlf/, shock /ʃɔk/
- Long words — get the stress right: abolition /ˌæb.əˈlɪʃ.ən/, literary /ˈlɪt.(ə.)ɹə.ɹi/, philosophical /ˌfɪl.əˈsɑ.fɪ.kl̩/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, morality /məˈɹælɪti/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like pipe, wage, abolition.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.