A magical moment on the zinnias this morning. Is it a monarch?Knoxville Police Chief Sterling Owen says, "It appears that what brought him to this horrible event was his lack of being able to attain a job.. His frustration over that. And his stated hatred for the liberal movement."
Police say they are investigating the case as a Hate Crime.
Joe Lauria on Huffington Post calls it an act of terrorism.Chapter 1
1 The beginnynge of the Gospell of Iesu Christ the sonne of God
2 as yt is wrytten in the Prophetes: beholde I sende my messenger before thy face which shall prepared thy waye before ye.
3 The voyce of a cryer in the wildernes: prepare ye the waye of the Lorde make his paches streyght.
4 Iohn dyd baptise in the wyldernes and preche the baptyme of repentauce for the remission of synnes.
5 And all the londe of Iurie and they of Ierusalem went out vnto him and were all baptised of him in the ryver Iordan confessynge their synnes.
6 Iohn was clothed with cammylles heer and with a gerdyll of a skyn a bout hys loynes. And he dyd eate locustes and wylde hony
7 and preached sayinge: a stronger then I commeth after me whose shue latchet I am not worthy to stoupe doune and vnlose.
8 I have baptised you with water: but he shall baptise you with the holy goost.
9 And yt came to passe in those dayes that Iesus cam from Nazareth a cyte of Galile: and was baptised of Iohn in Iordan.
10 And assone as he was come out of the water Iohn sawe heaven open and the holy goost descendinge vpon him lyke a dove.
11 And ther came a voyce from heaven: Thou arte my dere sonne in whom I delyte.
12 And immediatly the sprete drave him into wildernes:
13 and he was there in the wildernes xl dayes and was tempted of Satan and was with wilde beestes. And the aungels ministred vnto him.
14 After Iohn was taken Iesus came in to Galile preachinge the gospell of the kyngdome of God
15 and sayinge: the tyme is come and the kyngdome of God is at honde repent and beleve the gospell.
16 As he walked by the see of Galile he sawe Simon and Andrew his brother castinge nettes into ye see for they were fysshers.
17 And Iesus sayde vnto them: folowe me and I will make you fisshers of men.
18 And strayght waye they forsoke their nettes and folowed him.
19 And when he had gone a lytell further thence he sawe Iames the sonne of zebede and Ihon his brother even as they were in the shyppe mendinge their nettes.
20 And anone he called them. And they leeft their father zebede in the shippe with his hyred servauntes and went their waye after him.
21 And they entred into Capernau: and streight waye on ye Saboth dayes he entred in to ye synagoge and taught.
22 And they merveled at his learninge. For he taught them as one that had power with him and not as the Scribes.
23 And there was in their synagoge a ma vexed wt an vnclene spirite yt cried
24 sayinge: let be: what have we to do with the thou Iesus of Nazareth? Arte thou come to destroye vs? I knowe the what thou arte eue that holy of god.
25 And Iesus rebuked him sayinge: hoolde thy peace and come out of him.
26 And ye vnclene spirite tare him and cryed with a loude voyce and came out of him.
27 And they were all amased in so moche that they demaunded one of another amoge them selves saying: what thinge is this? what newe doctryne is this? For he comaundeth the foule spirites with power and they obeye him.
28 And immediatly his fame spreed abroade throughoute all the region borderinge on Galile.
29 And forth with as sone as they were come out of the synagoge they entred into ye housse of Symon and Andrew with Iames and Ihon.
30 And Symons mother in lawe lay sicke of a fever. And anone they tolde him of her.
31 And he came and toke her by the honde and lifte her vp: and the fever forsoke hir by and by: and she ministred vnto them.
32 And at even when the sunne was downe they brought to him all that were diseased and them that were possessed with devyls.
33 And all the cite gaddred to gedder at the dore
34 and he healed many yt were sicke of divers deseases. And he cast out many devyls and suffred not ye devyls to speake because they knewe him.
35 And in the morninge very erly Iesus arose and went out into a solitary place and there prayed.
36 And Simon and they that were with him folowed after him.
37 And when they had founde him they sayde vnto him: all men seke for the.
38 And he sayd vnto them: let vs go into the next tounes that I maye preache there also: for truly I cam out for that purpose.
39 And he preached in their synagoges throughout all Galile and cast the devyls out.
40 And there came a leper to him besechinge him and kneled doune vnto him and sayde to him: yf thou wilt thou canest make me clene.
41 And Iesus had copassion on him and put forth his honde touched him and sayde to him: I will be thou clene.
42 And assone as he had spoke immediatly ye leprosy departed fro him and was clensed.
43 And he charged him and sent him awaye forthwith
44 and sayd vnto him: Se thou saye no thinge to any man: but get the hence and shewe thy silfe to ye preste and offer for thy clensinge those thinges which Moses comaunded for a testimoniall vnto them.
45 But he (assone as he was departed) beganne to tell many thinges and to publyshe the dede: in so moche that Iesus coulde no more opely entre in to the cite but was with out in desert places. And they came to him fro every quarter.
The injured female purple finch plus male purple finch feeding together in our window box this weekend. She is doing well and clearly has support. We have been fortunate to provide food for them both.
It was a weakness of Voltaire's
To forget to say his prayers,
And one which to his shame
He never overcame.
-- Edmund Clerihew Bentley
"Walter Bagehot, editor of the Economist from 1859 to 1877, advocated
`animated moderation' in writing. And Sir Walter Layton, Crowther's
immediate predecessor, spent hours rewriting his staff's articles--so many
hours that one of his frustrated colleagues hit back with a clerihew:
Sir Walter Layton
Has a passion for alteration
Would to God someone could alter
Sir Walter."
In the past, anyone wishing to examine the document first hand would have had to approach the British Library "on bended knee," said Christopher Tuckett, a professor of New Testament studies at Oxford University.
"To have it available just at the click of a button is fantastic," he said. "You could do in two seconds what would take hours and hours of flicking through the leaves."
This 4th C text is the oldest complete text of the Septuagint and the NT. Its a good text to use instead of reconstructed Greek New Testaments for example because it establishes the state of an ancient text. There are English, German, French and Russian translations. Its very exciting to see Mark's gospel! Here's the opening. The ending of Mark is at 16:8.In today's excerpt--the legendary Library of Alexandria, located in Ancient Egypt, which made Alexandria the center of learning and knowledge for the entire Mediterranean world for over 600 years:
"Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 332 BCE but hung around just long enough to lay out the basic street plan and get construction underway. When he died a few years later, one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter, took control of Egypt and made Alexandria his capital, building great palaces and temples, including a temple to the Muses (or Museum). His son, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, started the library, which was based in or next to the Museum, using Aristotle's personal library as its core. Ptolemy III Euergetes continued the work, determined to gather in the library all the knowledge of the world, and he instituted an aggressive policy of collection that involved acquiring scrolls, copying them and then returning the (inferior) copies while retaining the originals. He supposedly had every ship that passed through Alexandria searched for new scrolls and borrowed the entire scroll collection of Athens, willingly forfeiting his massive deposit in order to keep the originals. Eventually the collection [was reputed to have] numbered over 500,000 scrolls--700,000 by some accounts--making it, by a considerable margin, the greatest collection the ancient world had ever known. ...
"Along with the collection of parchment (and later vellum) scrolls, the Ptolemies paid for a permanent faculty of 30-50 scholars to live and work at the library, and over the centuries their number included most of the great names of antiquity, including Euclid (father of geometry), Eratosthenes (who calculated the circumference of the Earth), Archimedes (legendary discoverer of the lever, the screw, and pi) and Galen (the most influential medical writer of the next 1,400 years). ...
"The Library was probably not a big as legend contends. Historian James Hannam has calculated that storing 500,000 scrolls would require 25 miles of shelving, which in turn would mean that the Library must have been a truly monumental building. None of the sources mention such a gargantuan edifice, and since the remains of the library have never fully been excavated its full extent remains a mystery.
"Most telling, however, is the evidence from other ancient libraries that have left remains, which show that even those renowned for their wealth and breadth had collections numbering in the thousands rather than the hundreds of thousands. The finest library in the history of ancient Rome was the Library of Trajan, which probably contained around 20,000 scrolls, while the Library of Pergamon, arch-rival to the Alexandrian library, probably had around 30,000."
Joel Levy, Lost Histories, Barnes & Noble, Copyright 2006 by Joel Levy, pp. 28-30.
African church leaders’ conservative stance is understandable: Many minister to flocks that have very traditional views on homosexuality and largely low exposure to the latest scientific findings on issues of human sexuality and related issues. They are in the dark over simple and long-established facts of science like that biodiversity is the rule and not the exception in nature.
It is not so long ago in some of our societies that twin babies were put to death on the basis of weird traditional beliefs. In Tanzania right now, albinos are being hunted down by people who use their body parts in witchcraft. Such attitudes were also common in the West in the past.
Irrational discrimination of individuals manifestly different from us is primordial human nature. Racism, tribalism, xenophobia, sexism, bigotry, homophobia and related attitudes are the outward expression of this primitive nature, which is only kept in check by education and legal or other sanctions.
Like South African Anglican Archbishop and Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu, I believe the African Anglican Church should not be obsessed with disagreement over gayism at a time when other issues demand greater attention.
Bishop Gene Robinson is to visit St Rumwold in Bonnington, Kent this Friday evening to speak in the St Rumwold lecture series.
Psalm 150 is open on the bookstand articulating "Let everything that breathes praise the Lord!" and on the screen "Signs of the kingdom in perfumed roses." Mine are delphinium and zinnias...its the particular blue and the particular reds that play against each other so well.
This means that you internalise the charge of being an abomination. You live a lie. And like any lived lie, insidious psychological damage is the price.
After three years, I couldn't handle the pretence any longer. I left, even though I had ostensibly had an easy ride in the church. Moreover, I left an atheist, a loss of faith that came about for a number of reasons, though the pretence played a major part.
What we need in the wake of Bishop Robinson's visit to the UK is more of these statements in which the central message is clear: gay people are not an "abomination".
This worked until one day she found a description of a child's face as "chloris", which translates as "bright green" - surely odd. So she asked her brother, who explained that it was in fact the word used to describe "freshly opening leaves in spring. And I realised that chloris was not really a colour at all, but a word for clarity and freshness, suitable as a word for children." Hence Warnock's passion for Greek: its translation into English has to be conceptual.
Must confess that Datura (aka Thornapple) has a pleasant odor. The plant is strongly narcotic, but has a peculiar action on the human frame which renders it very valuable as a medicine. The whole plant is poisonous, but the seeds are the most active; neither drying nor boiling destroys the poisonous properties. The usual consequences of the poison when taken in sufficient quantity are dimness of sight, dilation of the pupil, giddiness and delirium, sometimes amounting to mania, but its action varies greatly on different persons.
Rather than responding after every politically motivated crisis in Africa with condemnation, the UK needs to develop a long-term strategy of putting Africa on the road to real democracy, lasting peace and sustainable development.
The first step is to recognise that liberal democracy, which they are enjoying in the UK today, did not happen over-night, but it took centuries, during which King Charles was beheaded. Therefore, it is totally unrealistic to expect Africa, which is only 50 years, and Zimbabwe, which is just 28 years old, to practise perfect Western liberal democracy.
Secondly, it should be recognised that democracy cannot take root or flourish anywhere without effective democratic institutions. For that reason, the UK should put less emphasis on exporting Western liberal democracy and focus on helping African countries to develop independent judiciaries, state security forces and civil services, and most of all, an electoral commission.
The issue of civil partnerships — often referred to as 'gay marriage' — is settled, but for those who disagree with it, the advantages can be summed up thus: stable human relationships, of whatever sort, make stable societies.
Mrs Robinson's comments may cause some discomfort for her husband, the new First Minister. His office has funded, and presumably will continue to fund, the Gay Pride festival. Any withdrawal of that funding would expose his office to a lawsuit under equality legislation and we trust Mr Robinson will not expose the taxpayer to any more expensive tomfoolery by Government.
It also noted that a formal police complaint has been made against the remarks.
Alan Cumming is the new face of Dionysus (picture from the NY Times by Sara Krulwich) in a production of Euripedes' "The Bacchae" at the Lincoln Center festival in NYC. Charles' Isherwood's review points out use of David Greig’s casual, colloquial new version of the text (from a literal translation by Ian Ruffell) which puts a subtle emphasis on Pentheus’ horror of “real men” being “humiliated by women.” Not being there, I'll have to suspend my curiosity and catch it elsewhere. For those of you who are, this might be worth a visit.
An adult male pileated woodpecker (red malar or throat-stripe on the male, not the female) on our morning walk and clematis in the garden.
