Antiquitopia

When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it's a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearances because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time. One must have a thorough understanding of one's day-dreams if one is not to be troubled by them.... (Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove , In Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright) Here the character speaking is the painter Elstir, relaying this information to our day-dreaming narrator at his studio in seascape vistas of Balbec. He almost comes off as a Platonist in his desire to move from the appearances of things to the things themselves, but the true nature here to be grasped is not the form or idea of the good or beautiful, but the tr...

According to the NYTimes , the Dude abides in academe: December 30, 2009 BOOKS Dissertations on His Dudeness By DWIGHT GARNER Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 movie, “The Big Lebowski,” which stars Jeff Bridges as a beatific, pot-smoking, bowling-obsessed slacker known as the Dude, snuck up on the English-speaking world during the ’00s: it became, stealthily, the decade’s most venerated cult film. It’s got that elusive and addictive quality that a great midnight movie has to have: it blissfully widens and expands in your mind upon repeat viewings. “The Big Lebowski” has spawned its own shaggy, fervid world: drinking games, Halloween costumes, bumper stickers (“This aggression will not stand, man”) and a drunken annual festival that took root in Louisville, Ky., and has spread to other cities. The movie is also the subject of an expanding shelf of books, including “The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers” and the forthcoming “The Tao of the Dude.” Where cult films go, acade...

A powerful idea communicates some of its power to the an who contradicts it. Partaking of the universal community of minds, it infiltrates, grafts itself on to, the mind of him whom it refutes, among other contiguous ideas, with the aid of which, counter-attacking, he complements and corrects it; so that the final verdict is always to some extent the work of both parties to a discussion. It is to ideas which are not, strictly speaking, ideas at all, to ideas which, based on nothing, can find no foothold, no fraternal echo in the mind of the adversary, that the latter, grappling as it were with thin air, can find no word to say in answer. (Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove , I n Search of Lost Time ; trans. Moncrieff, Kilmartin, and Enright) This reminds me of a saying by Oscar Wilde: "When people agree with me, I always think I am in the wrong." Similarly, Proust suggests that when your ideas encounter no opposition, they are simply flimsy, lacking robustness; they la...

For full discussion, see here . Ancient Book of Mark Found Not So Ancient After All ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2009) — A biblical expert at the University of Chicago, Margaret M. Mitchell, together with experts in micro-chemical analysis and medieval bookmaking, has concluded that one of the University Library's most enigmatic possessions is a forgery. The book, a copy of the Gospel of Mark, will remain in the collection as a study document for scholars studying the authenticity of ancient books. Scholars have argued for nearly 70 years over the provenance of what's called the Archaic Mark, a 44-page miniature book, known as a "codex," which contains the complete 16-chapter text of the Gospel of Mark in minuscule handwritten text. The manuscript, which also includes 16 colorful illustrations, has long been believed to be either an important witness to the early text of the gospel or a modern forgery, said Mitchell, Professor of New Testament and Early Christian Literature...

Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth. According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization. "I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass." "Everything is here already," the pictograph continues. "We do not need more stars." Hist...

The New York Times has a nice obituary on Yosef Yerushalmi, who passed away earlier this week: Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past influenced a generation of thinkers, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 77 and lived in Manhattan. .... An elegant writer and mesmerizing raconteur, Dr. Yerushalmi earned his reputation as one of his generation’s foremost Jewish historians by plumbing eclectic subjects like the history of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s, messianism, the intellectual history of modern German Jewry and Freud’s relationship with his religion. In 1982, Dr. Yerushalmi, then the Salo Wittmayer Baron professor of Jewish history, culture and society at Columbia University, published perhaps his most influential work, “Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory,” a slim volume whose title bore the...

Other than having a cool name, this band has some catchy, somewhat addictive songs, such as the following called "Kings and Queens": Ok...I don't quite get what's going on with all the bicycles. And I am not quite sure what that resuscitation (resurrection?) moment was doing there. Perhaps that is the "promise" in the "kings and queens of promise" or the juxtaposition of self-destruction and promise, the the moment of being in between heaven and hell? But the lyrics pick up on elements of fragmentation, brokenness, perhaps alienation (unless that is too existentialist): Into the night Desperate and broken The sound of a fight Father has spoken We were the kings and queens of promise We were the victims of ourselves Maybe the children of a lesser God Between Heaven and Hell Heaven and Hell Into your eyes Hopeless and taken We stole our new lives Through blood and pain In defense of our dreams In defense of our dreams We were the Kings and Queens ...

The Feast of St. Nicholas has already passed (it was Dec. 6), but since so many people relate him to Christmas it is still relevant news that his face has been reconstructed using forensic anthropology. While many people may not have realized that Santa Claus was based upon a real person, St. Nicholas was an ancient bishop who lived in the late third to mid fourth century CE. He was born and died in Myra, a city in ancient Anatolia--modern Turkey. He attended the famous Council of Nicaea. He was particularly known for his acts of charity and giving anonymous gifts, hence many of the familiar traits and legends that began to grow around him. But what I didn't know was that his relics--including his skull--lie in the Basilica de San Nicola in Bari, Italy, and having taken measurements of his skull, his facial features have been reconstructed. So, here's what Santa Claus may have actually looked like: For background on the history of St. Nick and his remains, and the report o...

I just received news that the esteemed and highly influential Columbia Professor of Jewish Studies, Yosef Yerushalmi, passed away yesterday. I particularly enjoyed his book on history and memory, Zakhor .

I am reading Yi-Fu Tuan's very clearly written, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience . In his chapter on "Architectural Space and Awareness," which ranges from China, ancient Sumer, medieval European Cathedrals to modern architecture, he discusses the symbolic importance of space in a larger coherent worldview that is reflected in how we build, whether a home, a village, a church, or a skyscraper. While much of the chapter emphasizes continuities in how each society constructs its buildings and shelters in relationship to its larger symbolic system (to borrow a phrase from Mary Douglas), he notes something different is now happening in the modern world. Firstly, because of the high rates of literacy, the use of material and physical symbols are fading as the importance of verbal symbols rise: "verbal symbols have progressively displaced material symbols, and books rather than buildings instruct" (117). But there is something more, or something le...

Earlier I noted a typo in my particular edition of the RSV that I use for class in which the LORD says to Cain that sin is "couching" at the door (Gen. 4:7). I took it as a typo, since it would be better rendered as "crouching." It would be a simple typographical error of the omission of one letter, but would totally change the meaning of the verse from a menacing predator to sexually seductive. Kevin Edgecomb, however, noted that all the RSV editions he could find say "couching," and so it might be the actual translation choice of the RSV. I had a hard time believing this, since "couching" just did not make sense, and "crouching" does, in fact, work with the Hebrew at this point. Other translations, for example, use "lurking" (NRSV). I suggested in the notes to that post that this might be an even bigger modern scribal error--one in the base text of the RSV that never got emended. Nonetheless, Kevin's suggestion th...

Perhaps in the alliterative tradition of Shakespeare's "Full fathom five thy father lies" (Tempest 1.2.329), T.S. Eliot renders in his own play about Thomas Becket, "Murder in the Cathedral": The fool, fixed in his folly, may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns. These lines come in the midst of a scene highly reliant upon the Devil's temptation of Jesus in the Gospels. Here four different tempters come to Becket with different types of temptations that vary in subtlety from obvious physical temptation to the temptation of power. The tempter here seeks to remind Becket of his previous life of "mirth" and love, a life of pleasure, before he became archbishop of Canterbury. These lines are Becket's reply. The point is that one cannot return--literally turn back the wheel. What is done is done. If one seeks one's old life, one will find that this time around, things are different. He suggests that similar things happen from gen...

In a vote, the far right in Switzerland won a referendum to ban the construction of new minarets in the (notoriously?) neutral country. The ban itself was opposed by the current government, but the NYTimes reports ... The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 25 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution. The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum. The Swiss government said it would respect the vote and sought to reassure the Muslim population — mostly immigrants from other parts of Europe, like Kosovo and Turkey — that the minaret ban was “not a rejection of the Muslim community,...

Kevin Edgecomb at Biblicalia has just posted on typographical errors in his modern copy of Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History , particularly how the turning of Satan into Satin, turns a potentially powerful moment into silliness. In the Bible I use for my Lit Hum class, I also have found an interesting typographical error. It is the Meridian printing, which belongs to the Penguin Publishing group, of the RSV of Gen. 4:7. The story is of Cain and Abel. Abel's sacrifice to the LORD was accepted and Cain's was not. Cain becomes angry in response, but the LORD speaks to Cain, saying (with the typo included): Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it. With the typo, it seems that sin is spending the night, perhaps even bedding down at the door. The language of "couching" adjacent to "desire" is sug...

One of the best aspects of the Society of Biblical Literature meeting this year is that it is in New Orleans. I probably attended a panel and a half total. My schedule was packed with interviews and other events on Saturday and Sunday. It was a misty, cloudy, and rainy weekend. It felt like the U.K., but perhaps a bit warmer. But Monday the sun came out and I was able to wander through the French Quarter--not that I didn't wander before, but it was more enjoyable in the sunshine. After a plate of beignets and a cafe au lait at Cafe du Monde, my attention was caught by these beautiful prints/paintings--they are monoprints--of silhouetted trees against a marbled, colorful background. The colors were rich and deep, yet still caught a nice contrast against the foregrounded black trees. The trees had few leaves and the roots were in full view, exposed, just like so much became both covered and exposed after Hurricane Katrina. I spoke to the artist, hanneke danielle relyea of cl...

There seems to be a lot of interest in Genesis 1 at the moment. In addition to my post late last night on variation in its formal elements, there is a post at Early Jewish Monotheisms on whether or not it should be read as polemic. Although it shows a lot of similarities with and adapted the Enuma Elish (and, here, I think it needs to be read in terms of the larger Priestly narrative patterns in the Pentateuch), I tend to read it as liturgy rather than polemic. Gen. 11:1-9 is polemic. And, finally, there is Mark Smith's new book completely dedicated to Genesis 1-- The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 --which I have bought but have not read.

Years ago, Moshe Weinfeld argued (convincingly in my view) that Gen. 1:1-2:3 was originally a temple liturgy. It does come across as a tightly constructed--highly structured--hymn with, in fact, some passages that almost seem designed for antiphonal choruses. Yet, upon a close reading, there are a great many variations within this structure. Just when the structure seems established on day one, there is some literary riffing by the great artist (or group of artists--perhaps from generation to generation) that put this hymn together. Firstly, let is take care of general organization. Gen. 1:1-2 serves as a nice prologue, or introduction to the main sections of the hymn. The "In the Beginning" or "When God began" with the famous problematic first word בראשית with a shava under the first letter already sets us off into the realm of literary labyrinths of impossibilities and possibilities. Right on the heels of it is the famous rhymed pairing of תהו ובהו. It is ...

Beckoned anew to a World where wishes alter nothing, expelled from the padded cell of Sleep and re-admitted to involved Humanity, again, as wrote Augustine, I know that I am and will, I am willing and knowing, I will to be and to know, facing in four directions, outwards and inwards in Space, observing and reflecting, backwards and forwards through Time, recalling and forecasting. (W.H. Auden)

Animal femurs ascribed to saints who never existed, are still more holy than portraits of conquerors who, unfortunately, did. (W.H. Auden, "Marginalia" IV)

The NYTimes has a nice piece about how a few critically acclaimed actors in the acting troupe The Theater of War have been performing readings of Sophocles' Philoctetes and Ajax , for troops dealing with the traumas of war. November 12, 2009 The Anguish of War for Today’s Soldiers, Explored by Sophocles By PATRICK HEALY The ancient Greeks had a shorthand for the mental anguish of war, for post-traumatic stress disorder and even for outbursts of fratricidal bloodshed like last week’s shootings at Fort Hood. They would invoke the names of mythological military heroes who battled inner demons: Achilles, consumed by the deaths of his men; Philoctetes, hollowed out from betrayals by fellow officers; Ajax, warped with so much rage that he wanted to kill his comrades. Now officials at the Defense Department are turning to the Greeks to explore the psychic impact of war. The Pentagon has provided $3.7 million for an independent production company, Theater of War, to visit 50 military site...

From the NYTimes : November 12, 2009 Mormon Support of Gay Rights Statute Draws Praise By KIRK JOHNSON The Mormon church has been a target of vituperation by some gay-rights groups because of its active opposition to same-sex marriage. But on Wednesday, the church was being praised by gay rights activists in Salt Lake City, citadel of the Mormon world, for its open support of a local ordinance banning discrimination against gay men and lesbians in housing and employment. The ordinance, which passed unanimously Tuesday night, made Salt Lake the first city in Utah to offer such protections. While the measure probably had majority backing on the seven-member City Council anyway, the church’s support was seen by gay activists as a thunderclap that would resonate across the state and in the overwhelmingly Mormon legislature, where even subtle shifts in church positions on social issues can swing votes and sentiments. .... In its statement backing the ordinance, the Church of Jesus Christ of...

That is a question perennially asked concerning Heidegger, the highly influential 20th century philosopher--some may say the most influential 20th century philosopher--and Nazi. Is it possible to separate his philosophy from his Nazism? It is something being addressed, once more, in Emmanuel Faye's book, who says "NO!" See the discussion here .

In physics, an event is the intersection of the three dimensions of space and the dimension of time. In ritual, I would say, an event is the coordination of sacred space and sacred time. W.H. Auden discusses the event poetically: Between those happenings that prefigure it And those that happen in its anamnesis Occurs the Event, but that no human wit Can recognize until all happening ceases. An event is what happens between foreshadowing and retrospection, yet it is unrecognizable until its passage. It is only knowable in retrospect rather than in the moment. Perhaps. I think it is strange to express this in the perpetual present of poetry. Can there by retrospective poetic moments? Or is poetry, at least modern (and non-epic) poetry, only introspective? As such there is no poetic event, since there is no moment to see it from. Perhaps this is the point of the final line: "until all happening ceases." Is this the "happening" of a single event? Or is THE E...

James McGrath has a great posting of a cartoon, which he in turn picked up from someone else. I just had to repost it here, let it make its way through the blogosphere. This gets back to my posts from last year on Luke and Biblical Redistribution of Wealth. Just hit the tag on "Socialism and the Bible" to revisit those posts.

The Geography of the House Seated after breakfast In this white-tiled cabin Arabs called The House where Everybody goes , Even melancholics Raise a cheer to Mrs Nature for the primal Pleasures She bestows. Sex is but a dream to Seventy-and-over, But a joy proposed un- -til we start to shave: Mouth-delight depends on Virtue in the cook, but This She guarantees from Cradle unto grave. Lifted off the potty, Infants from their mothers Hear their first impartial Words of worldly praise: Hence, to start the morning With a satisfactory Dump is a good omen All our adult days. Revelation came to Luther in a privy (Cross-words have been solved there): Rodin was no fool When he cast his Thinker, Cogitating deeply, Crouched in the position Of a man at stool. All the Arts derive from This ur-act of making, Private to the artist: Makers' lives are spent Striving in their chosen Medium to produce a De-nacissus-ised en- -during excrement. Freud did not invent the Constipated miser: Banks have lett...

...even an unveiled and substantiated allusion does not offer any essential element for the artistic and ideological understanding of that image. The image is always deeper and wider, it is linked to tradition, it has its own aesthetic logic independent of the allusion.... Even if one single allusion...could be positively identified...it would not help us understand the traditional meaning of this image...nor its specific artistic function in the novel. (M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World , 114; trans. Helene Iswolsky)

I can imagine a forger clever enough to imitate another's signature so exactly that a handwriting expert would swear in court that it was genuine, but I cannot imagine a forger so clever that he could imitate his own signature inexactly enough to make a handwriting expert swear that it was a forgery. (Or is it only that I cannot imagine the circumstances in which anyone could want to do such a thing?) (W.H. Auden, Dichtung and Wahrheit X) It is almost like taking Polonius' advice to Laertes in Shakespeare's Hamlet as inevitable: not only "to thine own self be true" but one cannot but be true to oneself. Although one's signature is duplicable, one can only falsify others and not oneself. It is an interesting idea to express in handwriting. Although I am not sure it is true, and, in fact, Auden himself expresses parenthetical doubts that not being able to think of one who could falsify oneself is due to a lack of imagination.

This article from AP was just sent to me about a Church that has started a special doggie service: Before the first Canines at Covenant service last Sunday, Eggebeen said many Christians love their pets as much as human family members and grieve just as deeply when they suffer - but churches have been slow to recognize that love as the work of God. "The Bible says of God only two things in terms of an 'is': That God is light and God is love. And wherever there's love, there's God in some fashion," said Eggebeen, himself a dog lover. "And when we love a dog and a dog loves us, that's a part of God and God is a part of that. So we honor that." The weekly dog service at Covenant Presbyterian is part of a growing trend among churches nationwide to address the spirituality of pets and the deeply felt bonds that owners form with their animals. Traditionally, conventional Christians believe that only humans have redeemable souls, said Laura Hobgood-Oste...

Mark Goodacre, who as of late seems to scour YouTube for video clips of controversial finds, has posted a clip of Morton Smith discussing Secret Mark, which has been making additional waves in scholarship lately. I have decidedly not publicly defended or refuted anyone's claims on Secret Mark, and do not expect to get anything out of me anytime soon. Those who pay close attention to my CV--the nocturnal initiates--will know why. Here is the clip on Jesus' potential nocturnal initiation ceremonies: Be sure to click on the link above to get Mark Goodacre's comments.

The very famous and highly influential anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, has just died at the ripe age of 100, just a few weeks short of his 101st birthday. Frankly, I had not realized that he had been still alive all this time. The AP has his obituary: November 3, 2009 French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss Dies at 100 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 12:22 p.m. ET PARIS (AP) -- Claude Levi-Strauss, widely considered the father of modern anthropology for work that included theories about commonalities between tribal and industrial societies, has died. He was 100. The French intellectual was regarded as having reshaped the field of anthropology, introducing the concept of structuralism -- concepts about common patterns of behavior and thought, especially myths, in a wide range of human societies. Defined as the search for the underlying patterns of thought in all forms of human activity, structuralism compared the formal relationships among elements in any given system. During ...

The NYTimes has an article about a study coming out of McGill University in Montreal about the increasing prevalence of Creationism in Islamic communities and countries, a topic I know many of my regular readers will be interested in and and more informed about than I am. According to the article, Muslim Creationists tend to be "old earth" Creationists in contrast to the more Christian "young earth" Creationists, meaning most Muslim Creationists do not think the earth to be a mere 6000 years old. They have no real problem with geologists and astronomers who argue that the earth is billions of years old. But they do seem to have some problems with biologists: They do not quarrel with astronomers and geologists, just biologists, insisting that life is the creation of God, not the happenstance consequence of random occurrences. This, as with everything, varies from group to group and from country to country, but there is a growing presence everywhere in the Muslim wo...

Now, even as Noah--that sainted man to whom we are all beholden and indebted since it was he who planted the vine from which comes to us that nectar-like, precious, heavenly, joyful and deifying liquor that we call piot--was deceived when he drank of it since he was ignorant of its great virtues and power: so likewise did the men and women of the time partake with great pleasure of that lovely plump fruit. (Francois Rabelais, Pantagruel , Gargantua and Pantagruel ; trans. M.A. Screech)

One last post on Halloween, although I fully realize it is now All Saints Day. In my reading this morning, I ran across a passage from Victor Turner, who discusses Halloween in a series of cross-cultural calendrical rituals (as opposed to rites of passage) that emphasize the temporary reversal of roles and the importance of masks in those rites: In Western society, the traces of rites of age- and sex-role reversal persist in such customs as Halloween, when the powers of the structurally inferior are manifested in the liminal dominance of pre-adolescent children. The monstrous masks they often wear in disguise represent mainly chthonic or earth-demonic powers--witches who blast fertility; corpses or skeletons from underground; indigenous peoples, such as Indians; troglodytes, such as dwarves or gnomes; hoboes or anti-authoritarian figures, such as pirates or traditional Western gun fighters. These tiny earth powers, if not propitiated by treats or dainties, will work fantastic and ca...

According to the London Times , the Spanish Catholic Church with the backing of the Vatican has come out completely against the celebration of Halloween. The article quotes an earlier, more lenient position taken by the Vatican as follows: The Vatican appeared previously to take a more lenient position. Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican’s chief exorcist, once said: “If English and American children like to dress up as witches and devils on one night of the year, that’s not a problem. If it is just a game, there is no harm.” But the Spanish hierarchy begs to differ. Wearing skeleton suits, dressing up as vampires, witches or goblins or slapping on fake blood is not far removed from communing with the Devil, according to the country’s bishops. However, the bishops, with Vatican backing, have reserved their venom for the millions of parents who allowed their children to celebrate this “pagan” festival. Father Joan María Canals, the director of the Spanish Bishops Conference Committee o...

As all hallow's eve approaches, the NYTimes has an article on the polytheistic background of the highly commercialized holiday (well, aren't all holidays these days?): the autumnal festival of Samhain. Many people probably know that most of our "Christian" holidays rely upon an older calendar of European religious festivals, referred to as "pagan": Certainly, there is nothing new about Paganism per se. From Halloween to May Day to Yuletide, said Prof. Diana L. Eck of Harvard Divinity School, “There’s a way in which all of us, especially in the Christian tradition, follow a religious calendar that is pegged to ancient Pagan festivals.” One might add all of the fertility imagery (rabbits and eggs) in Easter. It was recognized early on by Christian leaders that it would be easier to convert people and keep them in the fold if many of the practices and festivals of the older religions were retained in some form and re-framed in Christian terms--that is why Chr...

Disease, particularly on an epidemic scale, often affects religion. I might point to what Thucydides, for example, says about religion during the great plague of Athens in the fifth century BCE at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. As people died of the plague and the plague spread, all social bonds broke down. He writes: Equally useless were prayers made in the temples, consultation of oracles, and so forth; indeed, in the end people were overcome by their sufferings that they paid no further attention to such things. (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.47; trans. Rex Warner) The complete abandonment of religion (and all law) is a rather extreme version of how disease affects religious observance. But less extreme but still significant changes, mostly coming from religious authorities have been put into play with multiple religions. A couple weeks ago we heard about changes in Catholic services, when the common cup for Eucharist ceremonies was removed and holy wat...

In my work of developing a spatiotemporal approach or a "poetics" of spacetime, I have been reading through Henri Lefebvre's Production of Space . For the most part, Lefebvre privileges spatial over temporal dimensions, but, in his defense, he claims he does so because this is a tendency of capitalist societies--privileging of space and the subordination of time is a quality of what he is studying. Nonetheless, in so doing he does show a certain sensitivity to time's relationship to space and how this relationship shifts from society to society, or, perhaps more accurately, from mode of production to mode of production. One aspect of space he considers is "absolute space," and it is his comments on this type of space I would like to use as a jumping off point in developing an understanding of sacred spacetime. He writes: Considered in itself--"absolutely"--absolute space is located nowhere. It has no place because it embodies all places, and h...

Today I purchased R. Crumb's new The Book of Genesis: Illustrated . Many bibliobloggers have been discussing the release of this book lately, showing a pre-released page or two. My local independent bookstore, Book Culture , has had this featured on their shelves for weeks now, even though it is much before its official release date of October 28. Kudos to Book Culture for being able to get this weeks before it is available elsewhere. I have merely glanced at it so far, so my comments are necessarily cursory. The illustrations are very earthy--even those of angels and God (although God appears a bit luminescent). It freely depicts what the Bible describes (e.g., Adam "knowing" Eve, or any other sex scene in Genesis with some nudity--such as bare breasts or butts, and, when not explicitly nude, nipple outlines show through clothing). I was interested in looking at Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac, which illustrates the internal turmoil of Abraham through his facial ...

Jesus said, "Earthly life consists of three days: a yesterday over which you have no control, a tomorrow which you do not know whether you will attain, and a today which you should put to good use." (Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, Minhaj al-'Abidin ; trans. Khalidi, Muslim Jesus )

Christ said to his followers: "If people appoint you as their heads, be like tails." "Blessed is he who sees with his heart but whose heart is not in what he sees." Christ said, "The world is a bridge. Cross this bridge but do not build upon it." Christ said, "Be in the middle but walk to the side." 'Abdallah ibn Qutayba, 'Uyun al-Akhbar 1:266; 2:268, 328; 3:21 (Trans. Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus )

Jesus said, "It is of no use to you to come to know what you did not know, so long as you do not act in accordance with what you already know. Too much knowledge only increases pride if you do not act in accordance with it." Ahmad ibn Hanbal, al-Zuhd (trans. Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus )

Mary Beard, the prominent Classicist and always-provocative and insightful writer, has turned her blog, A Don's Life , which is associated with the London Times, into a book . The book reprints some selected posts, as well as including quite a few comments (and I think that debate actually makes the book). It also has an essay, by yours truly, on the nature of blogging -- and why I am a convert to the genre, despite many initial misgivings about dumbing down etc etc. I hope you'll like it. This of course raises a publication question: why would anyone buy the book if they could just look at her blog for free? Nonetheless, it sounds very intriguing: I'd like to think that anyone planning to apply to a so-called "elite" university would find some reassurance here: Oxbridge interviews really aren't as mad as they are made out to be, and you'll find some useful reflections from someone on the "wrong" side of the interview in the book. You'll also...

So there has been a lot of discussion of Pope B16's welcoming of Anglican bishops and priests who want to defect into the Catholic Church (after a re-ordination). From the Anglican side, it has been seen as "poaching" and "predatory" as discussed by the London Times . It is "poaching" more conservative Anglicans who have problems with the ordination of women and (openly) gay clergy. On the other hand, this maneuver to attract conservative Anglicans has instigated the paradoxical speculation of a possible result of "liberalizing" the Catholic clerical structure. Since the move by the Pope allows MARRIED Anglican clergy to defect to become Catholic clergy as married clergy, it will reopen or give momentum to the discussion of allowing married Catholic clergy. Married clergy are allowed by every other Christian tradition--Orthodox and Protestant--but hasn't been a part of the Latin rite in over a millennium. Will anything come of this?

I have been reading some John Donne lately during my evermore frequent bouts with insomnia (is this the plight of all academics?), and I came across a couplet on prayer that I found interesting: Hear this prayer Lord: O Lord deliver us From trusting in those prayers, though poured out thus. (John Donne, Litanies XIV.125-6) I am fascinating by this prayer, since it is a prayer to deliver us from trusting in prayers--a truly paradoxical sentence.

There is an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the Great Books movement and "middlebrow" culture in the U.S. As someone who teaches a quintessential "great books" course, Literature of the Humanities, at Columbia University--not quite a "middlebrow" culture--I found the article interesting. I found the following few paragraphs interesting and strangely ironic: In my early 20s, when I was starting out as a graduate student in the humanities, I hosted a small gathering at my apartment. It didn't take long for my guests to begin scrutinizing my bookshelves. (I do the same thing now, of course, whenever I am at a party.) I remember that there were numerous battered anthologies, at least a hundred paperback classics, the Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (acquired as a Book-of-the-Month Club premium), probably six copies of PMLA, and several shelves of books that I had retained from childhood, including the Time-Li...

The London Times reports that archaeologists have unearthed a private amphitheater for the emperor at Portus, a site near Rome's Fiumicino airport. This is the first time that a large-scale dig has taken place at the site, known as Portus, which was discovered in the 16th century and excavated in the 1860s. Now two miles inland, it would have been twice the size of the port of Southampton and an important gateway between Rome and the Mediterranean. It is possible that it was frequented by 2nd-century emperors. British excavators, including staff from the University of Cambridge and the British School at Rome, said that the amphitheatre was likely to have been built for the private entertainment of a senior statesman or emperor and could have held up to 2,000 spectators. Professor Simon Keay, the project director, said: “[The amphitheatre’s] design, using luxurious materials and substantial colonnades, suggests it was used by a high-status official, possibly even the emperor himself...

Seek we then ourselves in ourselves; for as Men force the sun with much more force to pass, By gathering his beams with a crystal glass; So we, if we into ourselves will turn, Blowing our sparks of virtue, may outburn The straw, which doth about our hearts sojourn. (John Donne, "To Mr Roland Woodward")

I just completed Swann's Way , the first part of Marcel Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time . It is an absolutely beautiful book. It captures the always escaping evanescence of our memories, but fully sensually. It is the luxurious perfume that triggers something within us and sets out minds into places in our past, places that can never be the same again because we have changed. Lost places are the other dimension of lost time that slip on by, wafting and then dissipating in the air. The last line of the book captures the temporality of place beautifully: The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years. (Marcel Proust, Swann's Way , In Search of Lost Time ; ...

Yom Kippur is coming up on Monday. In Leviticus 16, the real action of the ancient ritual concerned two goats. One goat was slaughtered and the blood cleansed the sanctuary. The other, the "scapegoat" or the goat "for Azazel," had the people's sins passed upon it and it was driven into the wilderness (evidently where Azazel was). In Brooklyn on Monday Hasidic Jews will sacrifice a chicken in the " kapparot ." The idea is that sins are transferred to the bird and then disappear at its death. I don't know much about this ritual, its origins, its explanations, and its developments. But it sounds like the two goats from the ancient ritual combined together into a single chicken. Interestingly, it seems that this ritual contravenes rabbinic rulings on proper slaughter of animals.

I am about to teach the Epic of Gilgamesh again. My students read the Standard Babylonian version, basically since it is the best preserved. This version transforms the earlier epic versions into something of an epic wisdom text, particularly regarding the Utnapishtim's speech at the end. This speech and the Standard Babylonian version as a whole remind me of Ecclesiastes in many respects. They both concern themselves with the inevitability of death and, in a way, the meaninglessness of much of life. Coming to terms with both aspects leads to wisdom. Nonetheless, they approach this whole coming-to-terms-with-death-is-the-foundation-of-wisdom in different ways. Of course, one is narrative and couched in conversation between Gilgamesh and Utnapisthim. The other is a more wisdom text--a radical one, in fact--but appears more in the form of a treatise as the "Preacher" goes through all aspects of life to show how they are all a "chasing after the wind." The...