Category: Thinking Out Loud
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Rare Ingredients
Originally posted on Matters of Interpretation: Traditional 3 Kings, with a view of date palms, which produce dates, which are sometimes considered a rare ingredient. I grated orange zest the other day. Grating orange zest made me notice that baking has something in common with magic. Orange zest is not a particularly rare ingredient, at…
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Thanksgiving and Rejoicing
Hallelujah, grades are done!!! We have escaped like a bird from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken and we have escaped. Our help is in the name of YHWH who made heaven and earth! Psalm 124:7-8 Image: Paul Sandby, “Windsor Castle from Datchet Lane on a rejoicing night, 1768,” via Wikimedia Commons
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One of God’s Neat Tricks
We are having a thunderstorm here, this minute (10:59 a.m. edt), and the thunder is really loud, and long, which prompted me to look up on Google (which is still up, at least for now) about what that tells us about the lightning, if anything … Because I am a little leery of lightning, having…
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Students
Every session, as the session proceeds, my level of annoyance with the students – some of the students, at least – rises. “Are we going to need that book?” [About one of two books listed as “required,” two weeks into the course.] “I have been really busy with work, so I couldn’t take the quizzes…
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Everything Old is New Again
Here’s an old joke I thought of today. You can tell it lots of ways, but this is how I heard it: It’s some Soviet bloc country, and a military shoot-on-sight curfew has been imposed for some reason, so these two soldiers are patrolling the street. It’s 25 minutes to curfew. They see a guy…
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How I Feel When People Famous for Being Christian Tell Obvious Bold-Faced The-Black-That-You-See-Is-White Lies
For, as it is written, “The name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” Romans 2:24
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“This Morning, 4 a.m.”
Originally posted on Utopian Discourse: What I wrote this morning: First, it’s been extraordinarily difficult making time to do serious work on this project. It would seem this would be easy, since I’m not teaching and theoretically my part-time job requires fewer hours than teaching. In reality, however, as usual, this has proved not exactly correct…
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Masks and Models and Making Decisions, Oh My!
There are several reasons I don’t say much about “politics” and “current events” here. The main one is that I usually think I’m unqualified: I don’t know enough about whatever it is to have an opinion. I realize that’s a quaintly old-fashioned idea that doesn’t stop lots of other people these days, but I continue…
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Studying Esther 7 1-10
We are studying Esther 7:1-10 for Sunday, April 19. This is the climactic scene in the story of Esther where Haman is almost literally “hoist with his own petard.” [Some questions on the text are here.] Here are my notes on this text: BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: We’re in the book of Esther, which is primarily…
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Two Thoughts on Maundy Thursday
There are two different rituals associated with Maundy Thursday in the Christian tradition. One is foot washing, which commemorates the narrative in John 13. The other is the eucharist or holy communion or the Lord’s supper, which privileges the plot of the synoptics (Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-25, Luke 22:14-23). Normally, we would participate in some…
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Hospitals in Our Area Are Awesome
I just saw one of those newspaper headlines that are designed to induce fear in humans, to exploit it for commercial purposes. I learned about that recently from Margo Aaron at That Seems Important, and now she is one of my heroes. So I thought I would mention this: that in our area, our local…
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Wondering, Not Predicting
Reading a book about economics this morning, I came across this striking paragraph: Some economic historians claim that feudalism was ended by the Black Death, a pandemic that killed up to a third of the population of Europe and Asia in the 1340s. It killed so many labourers that huge tracts of land lay deserted,…
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Onion Rules, and Acceptable Group Generalizations
I have rules about onions. Usually I just say “I don’t like onions.” So, when I order food in restaurants – when I don’t forget that I have to say something about it, and just expect people to read my mind, which still happens sometimes, despite my age and experience – I ask for “no…
Matters of Interpretation 