Now we know what the leaves of the Tree of Life are in Revelation 22:2:
"..through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations," we know what to do with them.
This reminds me of a story from my childhood. My father, a priest in the C of E, regularly visited a psychiatric hospital in Kent near where we lived where he would celebrate Eucharist. He noticed that the leaves of the Bible from which he would read the gospel were disappearing. Making discrete inquiries, he found out that the inmates were tearing off pages to roll tobacco in and smoke. Remember those lovely fine thin pages (India paper) of the KJV?
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Saturday, March 08, 2008
International Women's Day
Today is International Women's Day!
In China, more than 125,000 people have added their names to a UNIFEM online campaign to end violence against women. Nearly 200,000 people around the world have joined in the effort, based on U.N. statistics that show 1 in 3 women suffers physical or sexual violence during her lifetime.
In Britain, opposition leader and Conservative Party candidate David Cameron promised to give one-third of ministerial jobs in his government to women, the Telegraph reported March 2. Currently, 6 of 28 members of the opposition's shadow cabinet are female. And to combat violence against women, the Million Women Rise Coalition is marching in London today, demanding the government develop a national strategy to end gender-based violence.
In South Africa, women marched in miniskirts to protest harassment from taxi drivers, the Johannesburg Star reported March 5. Men joined in the 300-person march responding to the sexual assault of Nwabisa Ngcukana, 25, who was stripped of her clothes and physically and verbally harassed at a taxi stand in Soweto for wearing a miniskirt two weeks ago.
The New York-based Goldman Sachs Group pledged $100 million to pay for the business education of 10,000 women in emerging economies worldwide over the next five years. Schools receiving grants will offer flexible, short-term education programs to women who lack access to traditional business programs for monetary or other reasons.
In the United States, the housework gender gap is closing, according to a March 6 report from the Council on Contemporary Families. Men have become four times more involved in housework and three times more active in child care in the past four decades, suggesting a generational shift in gender roles. Women cut back their average housework load by two hours over the same period.
Heather Baudin, a high school junior in Wasbah, Ind., won the right to play in her school's all-male baseball team after she challenged a state rule that barred girls from playing in the sport if the school also had a softball team. Her lawyers charged that the rule violated Title IX requirements prohibiting gender discrimination. Baudin was a little-league all-star.
Teofila Ochoa and Cirila Pulido--aged 13 and 12 during a 1985 military atrocity in Peru that cost the lives of 69 indigenous peasants, the majority of whom were women and children--were awarded $37 million in compensation from retired army major Telmo Hurtado by a U.S. federal judge in a March 5 ruling. During the incident, Hurtado issued orders to beat the men and rape the women, the Inter Press Service reported. Ochoa and Pulido survived, but many of their relatives were killed.
Pratibha Patil, the first female president of India, greeted International Women's Day with a call to her sisters to shape their destinies. "Our women folk inspired by Mahatma Gandhi came out of their homes to take part in the freedom struggle," she said. "Beginning with their determined efforts in the days before our freedom, today our women continue to strive to transform the social order into a more just and equal one."
At a European Union conference in Brussels this week, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Justice is thwarted when women are denied the right to play a political role in their nations; disease flourishes and spreads when women's perspectives are not taken into account in terms of disease prevention. In today's modern world, no country can achieve lasting success and stability and security if half of its population is sitting on the sidelines."
Mrs Thatcher (who would not notice the day, I think) is out of hospital. According to the Times,
Those who have met her in recent weeks said that she showed no apparent signs of ill health and she is lucid most of the time but occasionally drifts off in the middle of conversations because of difficulties with her short-term memory.
Last night, thanks to the generosity of a member of our Board of Trustees, several people from the seminary went to a performance of Grace at the Lucille Lortel Theatre with Lyn Redgrave. It was spectacular! Here's a review that indicates the highpoints.
Lyn Redgrave is the atheist (she prefers naturalist) mother of a son who opts to become ordained as an Episcopal priest. She's a professor; he was a lawyer. Her husband, an ameliorating influence between them, asks wittily, who's going to take a priest called Father Friedman seriously? In monologues of the son Tom we see an attempt to articulate faith as intuitive nonrational knowledge of God's existence. He compares this to love of the woman he wants to marry. Can you accept that I don't believe in God, she replies to his offer of marriage. Can you accept that I do, he answers.
The most poignant moments are at the end of the play following Tom's death (we are left to gather that it was in an act of religious terrorism, perhaps the London Underground bombings). How can his mother make sense of this? In a disclosure to her daughter in law when they are attempting a reconciliation (Grace forbade Tom's church funeral and the daughter in law read a Philip Larkin poem at the civic funeral about the way parents can ruin their children), Grace confesses that a shard of her rational self understands Tom's death at the hands of a religious fanatic to be brought on by himself. But Grace's self-justification is at the same time utter anguish and in inarticulate grief she screams out loud. In the silence that follows, when we realize that atheists have come to the limit of understanding, her daughter in law offers a tissue. You're in just as much mess as your granddaughter, she jokes! (The daughter in law was pregnant when Tom declared his desire to marry her).
The play ends later when Grace goes off stage to comfort a fretting granddaughter. We hear, through the loudspeaker in the baby's crib, Grace's consoling words. There, there, its alright, she says. I'll tell you a story about the watchmaker. This is a rational explanation for the creation and empirical ordering of the world. When her husband and daughter in law look in horror at each other, hearing a disembodied voice and thinking of the likely repetition of the animosity that existed between mother and son, we hold our breath in case nothing has been learned. Got you! comes the voice of Grace through the speakers. And we all breathe a sigh of relief...something other than rationalism has begun to be manifest in Grace after all. Something more like Grace.
In China, more than 125,000 people have added their names to a UNIFEM online campaign to end violence against women. Nearly 200,000 people around the world have joined in the effort, based on U.N. statistics that show 1 in 3 women suffers physical or sexual violence during her lifetime.
In Britain, opposition leader and Conservative Party candidate David Cameron promised to give one-third of ministerial jobs in his government to women, the Telegraph reported March 2. Currently, 6 of 28 members of the opposition's shadow cabinet are female. And to combat violence against women, the Million Women Rise Coalition is marching in London today, demanding the government develop a national strategy to end gender-based violence.
In South Africa, women marched in miniskirts to protest harassment from taxi drivers, the Johannesburg Star reported March 5. Men joined in the 300-person march responding to the sexual assault of Nwabisa Ngcukana, 25, who was stripped of her clothes and physically and verbally harassed at a taxi stand in Soweto for wearing a miniskirt two weeks ago.
The New York-based Goldman Sachs Group pledged $100 million to pay for the business education of 10,000 women in emerging economies worldwide over the next five years. Schools receiving grants will offer flexible, short-term education programs to women who lack access to traditional business programs for monetary or other reasons.
In the United States, the housework gender gap is closing, according to a March 6 report from the Council on Contemporary Families. Men have become four times more involved in housework and three times more active in child care in the past four decades, suggesting a generational shift in gender roles. Women cut back their average housework load by two hours over the same period.
Heather Baudin, a high school junior in Wasbah, Ind., won the right to play in her school's all-male baseball team after she challenged a state rule that barred girls from playing in the sport if the school also had a softball team. Her lawyers charged that the rule violated Title IX requirements prohibiting gender discrimination. Baudin was a little-league all-star.
Teofila Ochoa and Cirila Pulido--aged 13 and 12 during a 1985 military atrocity in Peru that cost the lives of 69 indigenous peasants, the majority of whom were women and children--were awarded $37 million in compensation from retired army major Telmo Hurtado by a U.S. federal judge in a March 5 ruling. During the incident, Hurtado issued orders to beat the men and rape the women, the Inter Press Service reported. Ochoa and Pulido survived, but many of their relatives were killed.
Pratibha Patil, the first female president of India, greeted International Women's Day with a call to her sisters to shape their destinies. "Our women folk inspired by Mahatma Gandhi came out of their homes to take part in the freedom struggle," she said. "Beginning with their determined efforts in the days before our freedom, today our women continue to strive to transform the social order into a more just and equal one."
At a European Union conference in Brussels this week, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Justice is thwarted when women are denied the right to play a political role in their nations; disease flourishes and spreads when women's perspectives are not taken into account in terms of disease prevention. In today's modern world, no country can achieve lasting success and stability and security if half of its population is sitting on the sidelines."
Mrs Thatcher (who would not notice the day, I think) is out of hospital. According to the Times,
Those who have met her in recent weeks said that she showed no apparent signs of ill health and she is lucid most of the time but occasionally drifts off in the middle of conversations because of difficulties with her short-term memory.
Last night, thanks to the generosity of a member of our Board of Trustees, several people from the seminary went to a performance of Grace at the Lucille Lortel Theatre with Lyn Redgrave. It was spectacular! Here's a review that indicates the highpoints.
Lyn Redgrave is the atheist (she prefers naturalist) mother of a son who opts to become ordained as an Episcopal priest. She's a professor; he was a lawyer. Her husband, an ameliorating influence between them, asks wittily, who's going to take a priest called Father Friedman seriously? In monologues of the son Tom we see an attempt to articulate faith as intuitive nonrational knowledge of God's existence. He compares this to love of the woman he wants to marry. Can you accept that I don't believe in God, she replies to his offer of marriage. Can you accept that I do, he answers.
The most poignant moments are at the end of the play following Tom's death (we are left to gather that it was in an act of religious terrorism, perhaps the London Underground bombings). How can his mother make sense of this? In a disclosure to her daughter in law when they are attempting a reconciliation (Grace forbade Tom's church funeral and the daughter in law read a Philip Larkin poem at the civic funeral about the way parents can ruin their children), Grace confesses that a shard of her rational self understands Tom's death at the hands of a religious fanatic to be brought on by himself. But Grace's self-justification is at the same time utter anguish and in inarticulate grief she screams out loud. In the silence that follows, when we realize that atheists have come to the limit of understanding, her daughter in law offers a tissue. You're in just as much mess as your granddaughter, she jokes! (The daughter in law was pregnant when Tom declared his desire to marry her).
The play ends later when Grace goes off stage to comfort a fretting granddaughter. We hear, through the loudspeaker in the baby's crib, Grace's consoling words. There, there, its alright, she says. I'll tell you a story about the watchmaker. This is a rational explanation for the creation and empirical ordering of the world. When her husband and daughter in law look in horror at each other, hearing a disembodied voice and thinking of the likely repetition of the animosity that existed between mother and son, we hold our breath in case nothing has been learned. Got you! comes the voice of Grace through the speakers. And we all breathe a sigh of relief...something other than rationalism has begun to be manifest in Grace after all. Something more like Grace.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Flat Lesions in the Colon
I'm a survivor of colon cancer so I'm interested in this news. And I had a flat lesion that proved to be cancerous.
The long and the short of it is that patients need to be sure that gastro-enterologists who do colonoscopies for us are looking for polyps and flat lesions (which may even be depressed thus less visible). A 15 minute screening procedure won't do! There's a dye that can show flat lesions and assist detection.
The study, of 1,819 military veterans, mostly men, found that 9.35 percent had flat lesions, and those lesions were five times as likely as polyps to contain cancerous or precancerous tissue. Depressed or indented lesions were the least common but the most risky. Together, the flat or depressed lesions accounted for only 15 percent of the potentially cancerous growths found in the study, but were involved in half of the cancers. Once the doctors spotted the flat lesions, they sprayed a bluish dye on them to see their outlines better and remove them completely.
The long and the short of it is that patients need to be sure that gastro-enterologists who do colonoscopies for us are looking for polyps and flat lesions (which may even be depressed thus less visible). A 15 minute screening procedure won't do! There's a dye that can show flat lesions and assist detection.
The study, of 1,819 military veterans, mostly men, found that 9.35 percent had flat lesions, and those lesions were five times as likely as polyps to contain cancerous or precancerous tissue. Depressed or indented lesions were the least common but the most risky. Together, the flat or depressed lesions accounted for only 15 percent of the potentially cancerous growths found in the study, but were involved in half of the cancers. Once the doctors spotted the flat lesions, they sprayed a bluish dye on them to see their outlines better and remove them completely.
Thursday, March 06, 2008
Premier of Sir John Taverner's Requiem available for seven days from BBC Radio 3 here. A review from the Independent is here.
Lynne Walker describes the performance:
Cast in seven movements, and drawing on lines from the Requiem Mass and the Koran, as well as Sufi texts and Hindu words from the Upanishad, it was composed for a cruciform space, here Liverpool's atmospheric Catholic cathedral.
The Requiem, from its ghostly opening, stratospherically high on the cello, to its ethereal ending, shows Tavener's gift for conjuring massive, if skeletal, architectural spans of music from modest material, relying on ritualistic development to substantiate wraiths of sound. Slender it may be on paper, but in performance the score creates an immediate ambience.
Dramatically polarised between movements of, variously, austere rigour, devotional intensity and shimmering beauty, the fourth movement, "Khali's Dance", is a whirlwind of agitated rhythm, punchy vocal writing, and a toccata-like line for the tireless solo cello (Primordial Light). Unamplified throughout, Knight gave a natural, unforced account of the taxing solo-cello part.
Mark McNulty's remarkable photography of the rehearsals and setting is here.
Lynne Walker describes the performance:
Cast in seven movements, and drawing on lines from the Requiem Mass and the Koran, as well as Sufi texts and Hindu words from the Upanishad, it was composed for a cruciform space, here Liverpool's atmospheric Catholic cathedral.
The Requiem, from its ghostly opening, stratospherically high on the cello, to its ethereal ending, shows Tavener's gift for conjuring massive, if skeletal, architectural spans of music from modest material, relying on ritualistic development to substantiate wraiths of sound. Slender it may be on paper, but in performance the score creates an immediate ambience.
Dramatically polarised between movements of, variously, austere rigour, devotional intensity and shimmering beauty, the fourth movement, "Khali's Dance", is a whirlwind of agitated rhythm, punchy vocal writing, and a toccata-like line for the tireless solo cello (Primordial Light). Unamplified throughout, Knight gave a natural, unforced account of the taxing solo-cello part.
Mark McNulty's remarkable photography of the rehearsals and setting is here.
Thanks to colleagues and students and friends, hosting and facilitating the first seminary discussion in New York City of The Torah: A Women's Commentary was sheer joy. 12,500 copies of the first run have sold out! The second printing is due any time.
Prof Andrea Weiss took us through Deuteronomy 32 and the five layers of the multivocal commentary pointing out the images for God such as Rock, Father, Mother. The translation is a carefully revised version of the 2002 NJPS translation finished in 2005 by Rabbi David Stern. Details here. Prof Weiss noted the verb of nursing in Deut 32:13 (often obscured by English translations) and the verb of begatting in 32:18. On this latter verse, the Rabbis described the image of God (as a woman in labor) imagining God saying, "You caused me to feel like a male trying to give birth." (Sifre D'varim 319). She read a poem from the interpretation section called Voices in which Death is compared to a messenger coming in the night. This brings out the idea of Deut 32 as almost the last words of Moses.
After his helpful response pointing out the contribution of these insights to commentaries already in existence on Deut 32, Prof Owens asked, Can we see this commentary side by side with (revised) Plaut in synagogue seats? An intriguing possibility.
Prof Andrea Weiss took us through Deuteronomy 32 and the five layers of the multivocal commentary pointing out the images for God such as Rock, Father, Mother. The translation is a carefully revised version of the 2002 NJPS translation finished in 2005 by Rabbi David Stern. Details here. Prof Weiss noted the verb of nursing in Deut 32:13 (often obscured by English translations) and the verb of begatting in 32:18. On this latter verse, the Rabbis described the image of God (as a woman in labor) imagining God saying, "You caused me to feel like a male trying to give birth." (Sifre D'varim 319). She read a poem from the interpretation section called Voices in which Death is compared to a messenger coming in the night. This brings out the idea of Deut 32 as almost the last words of Moses.
After his helpful response pointing out the contribution of these insights to commentaries already in existence on Deut 32, Prof Owens asked, Can we see this commentary side by side with (revised) Plaut in synagogue seats? An intriguing possibility.
Tuesday, March 04, 2008
Monday, March 03, 2008
Senator Obama and the Sermon on the Mount
As far as I can tell, in response to a question during Q&A sessions this past weekend in Ohio, Senator Obama noted that while he did not support same-sex marriage, he did favor granting same-sex couples civil rights such as transfer of property or visiting each other in hospital. He added (because the questioner was Pastor Leon Forte from Grace Christian Center in Athens, Ohio) that if people found that controversial, his position derived support from the Sermon on the Mount which he regarded as more important than an obscure passage in Romans.
We can be pretty sure he was referring to Romans 1. But he didn't clarify which parts of Matthew 5-7 he meant. And he didn't say that the Sermon on the Mount supported same-sex unions or same-sex marriage. That would be an astonishing argument. What he seems to have done is infer that Jesus' words in Matthew 5-7 did not exclude the possibility of recognizing that same-sex couples have legal rights and that Jesus' words should be given more weight than a few verses from Paul's letter to the Romans.
We can be pretty sure he was referring to Romans 1. But he didn't clarify which parts of Matthew 5-7 he meant. And he didn't say that the Sermon on the Mount supported same-sex unions or same-sex marriage. That would be an astonishing argument. What he seems to have done is infer that Jesus' words in Matthew 5-7 did not exclude the possibility of recognizing that same-sex couples have legal rights and that Jesus' words should be given more weight than a few verses from Paul's letter to the Romans.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Good Friday Talk at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Images of the Crucifixion
A look at works of art, including Gerard David's masterpiece, which use composition, color, and symbolism to contribute to the viewer's aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual experience.
Hazel Rodriguez
Free with Museum admission
7:00 p.m., Gallery Talk Stanchion, Great Hall
A look at works of art, including Gerard David's masterpiece, which use composition, color, and symbolism to contribute to the viewer's aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual experience.
Hazel Rodriguez
Free with Museum admission
7:00 p.m., Gallery Talk Stanchion, Great Hall
Hannah Betts: Gamophobes in the UK
Today's Guardian has a report from Hannah Betts on evidence that marriage is avoided in the UK.
Rates of marriage in Britain - 283,730 in 2005 - are at their lowest since 1896. Given the ebb and flow of population, this is the most paltry scoring since records began almost 150 years ago. Divorce statistics may have fallen (there being fewer candidates), yet, still, 40 per cent of first marriages and 70 per cent of second shots end in divorce.
According to this year's British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey, published in January, two-thirds of people see little difference between marriage and cohabitation (a mere one-fifth taking issue). Even regarding children, where more traditional views tend to apply, only one in four people believes that married couples make better parents. Meanwhile, over half declare weddings to be more about celebration than lifelong commitment, with two-thirds endorsing the truism that divorce can be 'a positive step towards a new life'. As Professor Simon Duncan, co-author of the marriage chapter, decreed: 'The heterosexual married couple is no longer central as a social norm.'
Here's the author's perspective:
Hailing from multicultural Birmingham, I did not attend a traditional Christian wedding until my mid-twenties. Words cannot express my head-spinning, Carrie-style horror at the revelation that my friend, a lawyer, was being walked down the aisle by one man to be handed over to another, a (rather less distinguished) lawyer whom she promised to obey, the whole thing rounded off by a series of male speeches while she remained silent in her faux virgin's white. Ten years on, another friend, the breadwinner in her relationship, was instructed by the officiating cleric to submit to her husband in all matters, to thunderous masculine applause.
Dr Jane Lewis, Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, argues that these days marriage involves no small degree of risk for women. 'At the beginning of the 20th century marriage offered protection of a sort. If the marriage worked, it was probably the best way of coping economically. Today, the costs of marriage in terms of childbearing are front-loaded for women. What if one marries, gives up work while the children are young, sacrificing pension contributions, earnings, promotion prospects - and then the husband leaves? Marriage has become a risk,' says Lewis. 'The more economic independence one has, the more one can protect against that risk.'
Some women see marriage as a sacrifice of self. Yet, as the conclusion notes, a detractor writes the article!
Rates of marriage in Britain - 283,730 in 2005 - are at their lowest since 1896. Given the ebb and flow of population, this is the most paltry scoring since records began almost 150 years ago. Divorce statistics may have fallen (there being fewer candidates), yet, still, 40 per cent of first marriages and 70 per cent of second shots end in divorce.
According to this year's British Social Attitudes (BSA) Survey, published in January, two-thirds of people see little difference between marriage and cohabitation (a mere one-fifth taking issue). Even regarding children, where more traditional views tend to apply, only one in four people believes that married couples make better parents. Meanwhile, over half declare weddings to be more about celebration than lifelong commitment, with two-thirds endorsing the truism that divorce can be 'a positive step towards a new life'. As Professor Simon Duncan, co-author of the marriage chapter, decreed: 'The heterosexual married couple is no longer central as a social norm.'
Here's the author's perspective:
Hailing from multicultural Birmingham, I did not attend a traditional Christian wedding until my mid-twenties. Words cannot express my head-spinning, Carrie-style horror at the revelation that my friend, a lawyer, was being walked down the aisle by one man to be handed over to another, a (rather less distinguished) lawyer whom she promised to obey, the whole thing rounded off by a series of male speeches while she remained silent in her faux virgin's white. Ten years on, another friend, the breadwinner in her relationship, was instructed by the officiating cleric to submit to her husband in all matters, to thunderous masculine applause.
Dr Jane Lewis, Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, argues that these days marriage involves no small degree of risk for women. 'At the beginning of the 20th century marriage offered protection of a sort. If the marriage worked, it was probably the best way of coping economically. Today, the costs of marriage in terms of childbearing are front-loaded for women. What if one marries, gives up work while the children are young, sacrificing pension contributions, earnings, promotion prospects - and then the husband leaves? Marriage has become a risk,' says Lewis. 'The more economic independence one has, the more one can protect against that risk.'
Some women see marriage as a sacrifice of self. Yet, as the conclusion notes, a detractor writes the article!
Saturday, March 01, 2008
The BBC's new film "The Passion" starts on March 16 in the UK and will be shown later on HBO. The site has links to readings of Mark's passion narrative. The film takes Jesus' Jewishness seriously and removes tendentious aspects of the passion narrative: the people present in Jerusalem do not say "His blood on us and our children" for example. Articles by Mark Goodacre and Ed Kessler provide scholarly perspectives. The whole thing sounds promising.
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