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Archive for 2007

Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The Biblical Archeology Review is the go-to popular guide to archaeology in the lands that have been variously named: biblical, holy, Syro-Palestinian, Levantine, and the like. Each of those adjective bears considerable ideological and political freight. (See my review on http://www.amazon.com).

BAR’s tireless and provocative editor, Herschel Shanks, has raised the Review’s status to the point that even professional archaeologists who profess no love for Shanks find it worthwhile to publish popularized reports of their findings in the periodical upon which has stamped his outsized image. (more…)

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unbending doctrine

Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The Biblical Archaeology Review is the go-to popular guide to archaeology in the lands that have been variously named :biblical, holy, Syro-Palestinian, Levantine, and the like. Each of those adjectives bears considerable ideological and political freight. (more…)

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Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I must confess to having missed the memo on The Da Vinci Code.

Many people have told me that they hated the poorly-written book but that the content ‘really makes you think.’ (more…)

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December 24, 2006

Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The Wall Street Journalhas in recent years distinguished itself for respectful coverage of religion. The Journal’s December 23-24, 2006 issue includes a sidebar by George Weigel entitled ‘Five Best. As Christmas nears, papal biographer George Wiegel selects essential books for understanding Christianity’.

If ‘understanding Christianity’ and ‘understanding Jesus’ can be as closely related as Weigel appears to think, then his list is noteworthy and insightful, both for the works it includes and for those that it does not. (more…)

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Discover your uniform: hoisting your colors

Posted in paterfamilias on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

One of the best moments of Guy Relief happens when we realize we don’t need a separate get-up for every event or even for every kind of event.

They key here is to apply what we know about managing the rest of life efficiently to the building of a wardrobe. This means we’re going to need a uniform.

No, let me be more specific. You’re going to need a uniform. The first application of the sieve comes at the color line. You can pay for an assessment of the colors that go best on you, and this can be worthwhile. But women have an uncanny intuition for this sort of thing, so you can probably get reliable advice from someone you love or from someone who works with you. If you have any doubt about the lady’s taste, ask two. If they coincide, you’re golden. (more…)

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Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The English have a fine expression for dogs like Tucker and the people who resemble them. ‘He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer’ is never spoken at the top of one’s voice. Rather, it is muttered quietly to another who has had the opportunity to observe the subject, and therefore to agree.

Tucker, it is true, was never endowed with spectacular intellect. Still, he is not entirely useless with a trick. My wife has trained him to exercise excruciating humility as he lies his little mixed-Labby frame down before his food dish, awaiting with impenetrable zeal the word ‘OK’, whereupon he leaps to his feet and dives in as though he never imagined anyone had invented anything quite as luscious as this dog food that’s been served to him this morning, perhaps oblivious to the rudimentary fact that he’s been eating the same dry stuff all his life. (more…)

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Posted in Uncategorized, tagged on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I love animals.

Proof of this comes in the two- and four-legged denizens of our home and the birds that have flocked to my backyard feeders on three continents.

Tucker is my dear, muttish Labrador Retriever. Like all Labbies, his intellect is overpowered by his instinct for giving and receiving affection. Tucker was the product of an unplanned mating on a Costa Rican farm four years ago.

During a four-year sojourn in a tiny, drafty apartment in Cambridge, England (1994-1998), we had promised our sons Christopher and Johnny that when we returned to Costa Rica-our adoptive country-we would have at least one dog and one cat.

When our friends on the farm informed us that a litter was unexpectedly on the way on their farm, we signed up. (more…)

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the weight of our story: Deuteronomy 1

Posted in textures on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Famously labeled ‘Torah’, the first five books of the Bible are received as Moses’, the lawgiver’s, legacy.

Yet ‘Torah’ relates the verb ‘to teach’, not ‘to legislate’. Torah is before anything else instruction.

The substantive legal component of this Mosaic anthology is embedded in the story of Israel’s origins, a genesis that this people shares with humanity itself. Common ancestry does not dawdle, however, and the story quickly particularizes its focus onto Abraham’s descendants and then those of Jacob himself. He is renamed Israel, for his habit and privilege of struggling with God. (more…)

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the man in the middle: Numbers 35

Posted in textures on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The Pentateuch’s development of a world where murdered Abel’s blood cries out from the soil into which it has poured imposes a severe legal mercy upon its organized inhabitants.

What is one to do when blood pollutes the earth beyond redemption unless it is taken seriously enough to be avenged? How will a community keep vengeance from becoming an absolute virtue in the light of the blessing it allegedly maintains?

The Levites, liturgical odd men out that they are, will play a part in the legislative balance that Israel achieves in its constituent documents. We read in Numbers 5 that they will serve as the custodians of a half dozen cities of refuge, enough for each pair of tribes to have claim on one. Proximity, when one is fleeing for one’s life, is not empty promise. (more…)

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naming our father: Numbers 27

Posted in textures on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Zelophehad’s audacious daughters cast a remarkable shadow as they stride to the Tent of Meeting to plead their case before Moses. Through pages of genealogy, land assignment, and guild-establishing, the book of Numbers has not been a text eager to name a woman’s name.

Yet one would probably be wrong to sense incipient feminism or even gender egalitarianism in this text. It is all about preserving the father’s name, one unfortunate enough not to have left sons and therefore vulnerable to erasure from Israel’s memory. That would be a fate at least as bad as sonlessness and death itself. (more…)

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