Like last year a short reflection on this year.

Media

I included only media that I haven’t mentioned elsewhere already.

• I read 32 proper books; the best one was Why Buddhism Is True.
• Movies of the year: Angles Egg (1985), Sirāt (2025), Ichi the Killer (2001) and Lilya 4 Ever (2002).
• Song of the year: Bloodline by awakebutstillinbed.
• Album of the year: what people call low self-esteem is really just seeing yourself the way other people see you and Windswept Adan.

Website

• I wrote 16 articles.
• I wrote 66 paper summaries.
• I wrote approximately 228,483 words in total.
• The total storage needed for the website has increased to 3.7 GB.

Other

• Started writing my bachelor thesis.
• Started writing a scientific paper (hopefully it gets published).

Paul Tillich’s notion of faith, as described in The Dynamics of Faith, is used, which I approve

In the course of a long life in the service of our Mother th e Church, let me tell you that there is one sin I have come to fear above all others. Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He cried out in His agony at the ninth hour on the cross. Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith. Let us pray that God will grant us a Pope who doubts. Let Him grant us a Pope who sins and asks for forgiveness. And carries on

7/10

He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

~ 2 Corinthians 3:6

Fun musical movie, perfect for the Christmas season. It looks gorgeous—stop-motion with a kind of puppetry and everything is extremely well made. Not just the set design, but the composition as well.

If there’s something deeper to say about it thematically, it might be a critique of reductionism: one can understand all the elements of a greater concept and still fail to grasp it, because sometimes the whole is more than the sum of its parts. 8/10

Very unique movie. How many movies or stories in general do you know that take place 80,000 years ago, when we humans were still “half-apes”? Such a unique concept: a tribe of early humans that doesn’t know how to make fire and for whom fire is holy. When their fire goes out, they have to go on a quest to find new fire for their tribe.

It has to be said that this story is fiction, who knows if it really happened like that, but it’s certainly fun to think this is how it might have happened. One way I like to think about the movie is as a journey showing how humans evolved: how different techniques are incorporated from other tribes, how new things are learned throughout the journey, and so on. 8/10