A Friendly Letter, The Blog.

Can I really blog from my Blackberry? Let’s find out. . . .

Good grief, I can.

No rest for the wicked.
I’ve just arrived home from the week-long Gathering of Friends General Conference in Bowling Green, Ohio, and in a couple hours must head out for North Carolina Yearly Meeting-Conservative.
There’s much to be reflected on from the earlier leg; but no time to do it now.
Stand by; and keep those card and letters coming in.

A sign of the times:

Earlier this month, two things happened the same day.

First, a friend sold all twelve volumes of my set of The Interpreter’s Bible. This was an old favorite, a set I bought in 1980 for about $350. Sent off for it, waited a few weeks, and it came in a big mail sack all its own.

I actually studied some of it too (would you believe Revelation, the whole thing?), while hauling the dozen hefty volumes (forty-some pounds worth) among six different residences across three states. After lingering on Amazon for several weeks, the set brought a bit over $100, not bad.

One of the twelve big volumes of TIB

The Interpreter’s Bible was a monument to devoted scholarship: Open it up and each two-page spread offered two parallel translations of a given text, King James and the Revised Standard; under that was a running exegetical analysis of the text, as teased from the Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic by the best western scholars of the mid-century. Under that, same pages, was a running commentary called Exposition, which I figure several generations of mainline preachers mined for Sunday sermons. User-friendly before user-friendly was cool. Each biblical book had a detailed introductory essay , putting it in historical and theological context. It was great.

But after thirty years, I’m facing the need to downsize drastically from my eight-plus bookcases full of books to the next round, when I figure I’ll need to have no more than one. Bookshelf, that is.

So these big guys had to go. I hope their new owner finds them as useful and reassuring as I did.

Now, of course, there’s a new edition, the NEW Interpreter’s Bible, which sells for about $500. I’d love to have one, though I figure I’ll have to wait for the thumb-drive version.

But anyway, about ten o-clock that same night I read a short review in the New Yorker of a novel by the Irish writer, Roddy Doyle, called The Dead Century. It’s about an old IRA warrior, looking back over his life and the history of his tormented country.

I’m interested in Doyle, not only because I’m interested in Ireland, but also because one of his earlier books was The Commitments, about a young Dublin lad who starts an unlikely but tuneful soul cover band there, which (the book and band) turned into a terrific movie of the same name.

The Commitments: For a Spot On Your Netflix Gotta See List

So I see this review and decide I’d like to give Doyle’s new one a whirl.

It’s late; and our local Barnes & Noble, if it’s still open, might not have it in stock.

But not to worry. I sit down at the computer, punch up Amazon, and within five minutes, for about ten bucks, the book appears on my Kindle.

Track this: It’s less than half an hour from knowing nothing of the book, to taking a fancy, to buying it, and starting to read it, without ever leaving the house. Oh — and the damned thing is weightless too.

This post isn’t a commercial for the Kindle; it’s about the book. Books have been at the center of my life. So I just wanted to take note of how much change, not only in books themselves, but in how we deal with them, was manifest in this one turn of the planet.

Younger folk may shrug. But my mind can still be boggled, and as I settled down with Doyle’s new tale, remembering my Interpreter’s Bible, that was one more time.

This is excerpted from The Friend of London:

Talking About God with Karen Armstrong

‘”We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile.” Karen Armstrong has never been one to dodge calling a spade a spade, and last week at Friends House London, without a note, she gave a dazzling, scholarly and inspiring address on what is wrong with lots of God-talk today . . . .

Karen Armstrong — A Skeptical cartoon from the Guardian

‘About 500 Friends and members of the public flocked into the main hall. . . . Her theological range is huge, she has something to say, and she says it. . . .
‘It is not that she rejects all the criticisms of religion made by Dawkins, Hitchens, et al. Indeed her book makes clear that some of their criticisms are valid. The problem in her view is that their analysis is not only intemperately expressed, but disappointingly shallow. . . .
“Besides, there is another context – a growing appreciation of the value of unknowing. That is what she wanted to share last week. Her talk was a veritable Cook’s tour of insights from the world’s great religions stressing the importance of recognising the limits of our knowledge and the value of silence, reticence and awe. . . .
“To anyone tempted to think that surely everyone knows what God is . . . Karen Armstrong has a firm answer: God is not a being at all, and we really haven’t a clue what we really mean when we say that God is “good,” “wise,” or “intelligent.”
‘Taming and domesticating God’s otherness it not helpful. . . . Earlier ages had a far better grasp of symbolism, allegory and myth.
‘In the Middle Ages, the word “belief” did not mean intellectual assent to a particular proposition. It came from the Middle English bileven, which meant “to love, to prize, to hold dear.”
‘She emphasised religion as a practical, not a theoretical, discipline. Something that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart. . . .Like any skill, it requires perseverance, hard work and discipline.’

–Rosemary Hartill The Friend June 18, 2010.

An audio of Armstrong’s talk is here.

I’m with Armstrong. I think we non-non-theists too often try to make god as familiar and cozy as my calico cat sleeping right next to my elbow, flicking her fluffy multi-colored tail and knocking old papers off the top of the desk. . . .

A great cat. But an adequate metaphor for god? Not.

Thanks to Scott Horton and his peerless “No Comment” blog, for this quote from Plato, which struck home with me today:

Socrates: For if you put me to death, you will not easily find another, who, to use a rather absurd figure, attaches himself to the city as a gadfly to a horse, which, though large and well bred, is sluggish on account of his size and needs to be aroused by stinging. I think God fastened me upon the city in some such capacity, and I go about arousing, and urging and reproaching each one of you, constantly alighting upon you everywhere the whole day long. Such another is not likely to come to you, gentlemen; but if you take my advice, you will spare me. But you, perhaps, might be angry, like people awakened from a nap, and might slap me, as Anytus advises, and easily kill me; then you would pass the rest of your lives in slumber, unless God, in his care for you, should send someone else to sting you.

–Plato, Apology, 30e-31a (H.N. Fowler transl.)

And this lovely painting there too:

The Death of Socrates, Giambettino Cignaroli, around 1750

Read Scott’s reflective post on this quote and painting here.

. . .What Is This Sh*t??
Photo album from a recent revealing sojourn is here.

I am pleased to announce that the long-awaited new issue of the distinguished, even legendary journal Quaker Theology has just gone online.

Besides the usual stunning cover, this issue includes several pieces that will be must-reads and must-discuss for up-to-the-minute Friends out there.

Catching up can be done two ways: one is to subscribe and get your very own paper copy, or one for your Meeting or college library.

The other, quicker way is to go to the QT website, because all its issues are online, and yes, for free.

One of the many intriguing items in the issue is an account of the journal’s remarkable favorable influence on the job prospects of its author-contributors. Who got the lucky charm this
time?

Check it out and see.

Celebrating a good rain after a dry month when the grass and many weeds were turning brown. This is right outside the back door. I think this is a variety of redbud tree.

But at upper left is a tendril of some kind of aggressive crawling vine which will take over and strangle the entire planet unless the Snipperdroids get here from the planet Whackaweed in the nick of time.

Below is the same tree, different angle and different light. The rain is the important part. We’re hoping it comes back before another month passes.

Just in the Nick of Time . . . . Amid shouts and Hosannas, the World-Famous Fayetteville Strawberry Mandala
made its annual appearance.

This is the all-too-brief strawberry season in the Carolina Sandhills region, and the yearly return of this miraculous manifestation was eagerly awaited.
As usual there were unconfirmed reports that its coming raised the dead and stopped the various wars.

More credible were the accounts that its consumption had a definite curative effect on dyspepsia and ill-humour, at least temporarily.

However, our Friends correspondent reported continuing controversy in those ranks. Liberal Hicksites were reliably said to be dosing their arrangements with touches of honey.

Whereupon the Wilberry-ites stormed out of the meetinghouse, insisting that Fragaria × ananassa (the proper traditional name) was only properly eaten PLAIN.

Fortunately, this time UN peacekeepers did not need to be called for. . . .