Remades And Human Dignity

I've been reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville. I'm not exactly sure how to classify it. It is recommended on NPR's 100 must read sci-fi and fantasy list, it is recommended on a number of steampunk lists, and it is also a defining book behind the new weird genre.

Alyona Ivanovna And The Image Of God

I'm reading Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I am loving the book, but one scene in particular toward the beginning of the book caught my attention. In this scene the main character, Raskolnikov, overhears a few people contemplating a world without Alyona Ivanovna, a shrewd old pawnbroker. During the exchange the following observations are made in justification of the murder of Alyona:

The I Am And The Image

I'm currently reading God With Us by K. Scott Oliphint. In summary, the book is about how God's attributes can be completely independent of creation, yet how his actions can interact with creation. To (over) simplify, how does an infinite, eternal, and unchanging God interact with space, time, and ever-changing creation? Oliphint spends a lot of time unpacking the name of God, "I AM WHO I AM". Without getting into the argument of the book, one thing in particular was driven home in the chapter "I Am ... Your God": creation is a translation of the thoughts of God. Oliphint uses the Eimi/eikon ("I Am"/image) distinction. God is the Eimi and creation is the eikon. While creation reflects God, it is not God. Building upon the notion that creation was in the mind of God before it existed, Oliphint says, "No matter how accurately [creation] represents God's thoughts (and it does represent them accurately), the fact of the matter is that it re-presents those thoughts; it re-presents them as created, which, in their original form, they were not." This Eimi/eikon distinction is a part of the Creator/creature distinction.