Restoring Eloquence

   I was recently at a reunion for an online school I had taken classes at for the 2016-'17 school year, and as you can imagine, meeting people "in real life" after only having known them from the internet is a very strange thing. I think I can safely assume that we all have at least one person in our lives that we've known online for a certain amount of time, and then later met them in the real world.    While at this reunion, more than half of the people who met me for the first time had the initial reaction in the form of a certain nickname: "Falafel". They had known me under that name from the internet, it was a name bestowed upon me for the purpose (I'm assuming) of actually being able to call me by a name that can be fully spelled out, since my last name is Pfohl (hard to spell, right?). So in the words Jack used in his post, I had both the Invented Ethos (the nickname Falafel), and my Perceived Ethos ("hey, it's Falafel! that funny d...

     Have you ever seen a speaker who is obviously unprepared and looking unprofessional? What about an athlete who endorses a sporting goods product? What about a business which has a dress code for it’s employees? All of these occurrences are based in the Aristotelean idea of ethos.      In order to fully understand ethos, we have to reach back to the roots of classical rhetoric.  Aristotle, in his book Ars Rhetorica , enumerated three modes of persuasion: logos, pathos, and ethos. Logos was considered logical proof, such as statistics, data, and other types of formal reasoning. Pathos is an emotional appeal, like when a commercial sets a particular emotional mood that’s persuasive. But ethos is more difficult to define.       In his typical wordy style, Aristotle defines ethos as persuasion “achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible.” To break that down a bit f...

    I've been wrestling with the concept of "Opportunity".  What is Opportunity?    A quick search on Google will get you this definition: " a set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something. "  I feel as though God has given me a ton of opportunity over these last few months, based on this definition. Not only did he give me the opportunity to be saved from my sinful self, but he's given me so much opportunity to be happy outside of the main thing he has called me to do.    Not only does God present us with unique opportunities, but he also gives us the free will to decide whether or not to seize these times when we are potentially connected to a future we would enjoy, or some sort of change. He's got our backs, He gives us all the things we will ever need in life, and yet we sometimes (well okay, a lot of times) reject His provisions.   I've recently had a lot of Opportunity presented to me by my Fathe...