Don’t love the Questing but do love this project.
Don’t love the Questing but do love this project.
Early Christmas gift.
I really like MBD’s coinage: “But Your iPhone” Conservatism. And he’s right that it will fail.
On the blog I wrote up ten thoughts about Rian Johnson’s new Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man.
I’m in CT this morning with a column about the attributes of God revealed in Bethlehem.
Thesis:
Saint Paul’s Greek is so poor—so densely knotted and infamously thorny—because it was not, in fact, his first language. He was raised in a household that spoke fluent Aramaic, and he also learned very young to read biblical Hebrew.
Thus, while he was technically fluent in Greek, it was actually his second or third language, the way the child of immigrants grows up with a mother tongue in the house and a city tongue outside of it. That would make Paul a savvy code-switcher based on regional, cultural, social, economic, and religious context. It would also explain his letters, as well as his self-identification as a Hebrew, his regular disagreement with known LXX traditions and sometimes evident allusions to the MT, and Acts' explicit depiction of him as fluent in Hebrew (=Aramaic).
Besides standard scholarly assumptions about Paul, I’d be interested to know scholarly reasons to doubt this thesis as at least plausible, if not probable.
TIL that Bauckham argues that Junia (Rom 16:7) may be a Latinized name for Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza (Luke 8:3; 24:10).
H/T: Jason Staples
Over on the blog I wrote up why I appreciate Clare Morell’s The Tech Exit so much.
Regarding Deut 29:28 (ET 29:29), Jason Staples writes that this “is the only place in the LXX that κρυπτὸς and φανερός appear together” (Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, p. 169n90). He sees a strong allusion to this verse in Romans 2:28-29. Depending on what counts as LXX/OT, this morning I stumbled upon another pairing, in 2 Macc 12:41:
πάντες οὖν εὐλογήσαντες τὰ τοῦ δικαιοκρίτου κυρίου τὰ κεκρυμμένα φανερὰ ποιοῦντος
Staples' claim may be stricter than mine, referring solely to the adjectival and not other forms, but given the context of the passage—idolatry, sacrifice, resurrection, and divine judgment (not to mention praying for the dead!)—I thought it notable as another echo for Saint Paul’s use of the terms.
Academic administrators, in the meantime, will need to ask themselves whether their own recent ideas, including a doctrinaire commitment to the unassailability of students’ feelings and identities, helped get them into this mess.
On the critical trope, “it was another great year at the movies."
Off the cuff QB rankings through week 14…
Read MZS on Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair. Not sure I can spare 270 minutes of uninterrupted time this week, but I’d like to.
Freddie at this best (warning for language).
On the blog I wrote about deleting the browser on my phone (having already deleted everything else but music).
Checks out.
Over on the blog I wrote about why the traditional Protestant solas don’t imply each other.
By 1964, all 75 million boomers had been born – and the United States had only 191 million people in it. Boomers made up about 40 percent of the country…
Although no one ever sat down and calculated it, this critical number – 40 percent – would give a rough idea of baby-boom power as the generation passed through the various stages of life. Boomers started voting in the 1966 elections, and by the time Ronald Reagan chased Jimmy Carter from the White House in 1980, they were casting 40 percent of the votes. Two years later they were at 43 percent.
The boomers were sometimes polarized on major issues, it is true. But on any matter that united them, it required a near-unanimous resistance movement to stop them. That is why politicians made the country liberal on sex in the 1970s, when the boomers were mostly in their twenties; business-friendly in the 1980s, when the boomers were mostly in their thirties; and investment-friendly—starting with Bill Clinton’s second term—in the 1990s, when the oldest boomers were entering their fifties.
This was important, because the boomers’ command over the economy would wind up more impressive than their command over the political system. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the boomers were between 25 and 43, entering their most energetic adult years just as America was being called on to write the rules for the global economy. When they were in their prime, in the prosperous 1990s, they made up well over half the workforce.
More casting news for the Beatles biopic. I can only assume we’ll hear soon about who will play Alasdair MacIntyre in the key role of lending Yoko Ono a ladder, the catalyst for her love affair with John Lennon.
Finally found a way to watch this thing.
Over on the blog I wrote about Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio.
I wrote about the C. S. Lewis Test.
I have a family friend who’s done this for years. What a sweet story.
