Antiquitopia

As others have also posted, there is an article in the Jerusalem Post about ancient Israelite wine here .  It is a nice companion to last year's discussion of ancient Israelite beer here .

An old NYTimes Op-Ed article by one of my old professors, John Anthony McGuckin: December 25, 2007 Op-Ed Contributor St. Nick in the Big City By JOHN ANTHONY McGUCKIN  ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place? Well, it’s a New York story. In all innocence, the morphing began with the Dutch Christians of New Amsterdam, who remembered St. Nicholas from the old country and called him Sinte Klaas. They had kept alive an old memory — that a kindly old cleric brought little gifts to the poor in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity. While the gifts were important, they were never meant to overshadow the mess...

I just received my copy of the latest JAAR (79:4).  In it is a short appreciation in memoriam of Alan Segal, my late advisor, written by Amir Hussain.  Amir tells of Alan's contributions to research in both ancient Judaism/Christianity and more broadly to the study of religion, his activities in the AAR, his teaching, and some personal remarks.

For those who missed it, Hendrickson Publishers has released a facsimile edition of Codex Sinaiticus.  Being to scale, it is of course huge, as is the price. Check it out here for you or your library--it can be yours for only $799.

I just saw that there is a new version of Attar's Conference of the Birds!  I am excited to check it out, since I teach the Conference of the Birds in my Exploring Mysticism course. Check it out here .

It is always nice when multiple classes start overlapping.  My Religions of the World and my Sexuality and Christianity classes hit upon martyrdom and monasticism at the same time, although we spent much more time on these topics in my Sexuality and Christianity class. I had a student in one class make a suggestion through a momentary flash of inspiration that the monks--at least many of the earliest eremetical hagiographies--acted much like a shaman.  I would like to sit, think, and see if we can develop this idea a bit and see where it leads us. Firstly, while Shamanism proper belongs only to Siberia and the northern Caucuses, it is a phenomenon that shows some interesting cross-cultural comparisons with other phenomena of holy men and women, medicine men and women, etc., so long as historical context is properly taken into account. Some of the qualities often associated with these figures are: 1.  Death imagery is prevalent--the shaman is surrounded by...

My latest painting, finished just two nights ago.