Shannon Costello

1)  I am determined to finish this book someday! 

2)  A nice math quote:  “And the verses are twenty-seven, which is the cube of three.  For three times three are nine; and nine itself, if tripled, so as to rise from the superficial square to the cube, comes to twenty-seven.” (page 629)

3)  Augustine spends the last section of this book pointing out that he doesn’t need to refute those who claimed the Christian religion would last no more than 365 years.  Not that I had ever heard of that before, but that’s the point.  The 365 years had already passed; they were obviously wrong.

Augustine encourages those who want to promote various end-time theories to refrain from doing so, since there is no way to prove what they are saying and the Bible says no one can know the day or the hour.

I guess I like the perspective he provides- looking from the outside and theories about the future that get people all stirred up.  It seems to me that the closer we get to ourselves in history, the more we lose perspective.  Isn’t there someone in every generation who thinks the world will end soon?  And I’ve heard rumors- unconfirmed- that people ‘way back in the seventies were concerned that the earth was cooling.  Were they right or are we?  I don’t have any more of an idea of the truth than the next person- but thinking about perspective causes me to calm down a little and wonder where I am mistaken.