I’ve been looking for PDF scans of old children’s picture books. I found a great collection at the Library of Congress. It’s not hard to tell why some of these fell out of circulation, like this page from Denslow’s Mother Goose:

(AP) Cool and collected, Kavya Shivashankar wrote out every word on her palm and always ended with a smile. The 13-year-old Kansas girl saved the biggest smile for last, when she rattled off the letters to “Laodicean” to become the nation’s spelling champion.

From Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, p. 1202:

Laodicea

The church at Laodicea is bitterly condemned, not for being outspokenly opposed to the doctrines favored by John, but for being neutral. John apparently prefers an honest enemy to a doubtful friend:

Revelation 3:15. I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

Revelation 3:16. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

"Laodicean" has therefore entered the English language as a word meaning "indifferent" or "neutral."

Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend:

One thing that can be said about Pharisees is that the most common stereotype about them is almost certainly wrong. In the dictionary, today, if you look up the word Pharisee you’ll find as one of the later definitions “hypocrite.” This has always struck me as bizarre — somewhat like defining Episcopalian as “drunkard” or Baptist as “adulterer.” To be sure, there are no doubt Episcopalian alcoholics and Baptist philanderers, just as there must have been Pharisaic hypocrites. But as I tell my students, agreeing to commit hypocrisy was not an entrance requirement for the Pharisaic party. There was no hypocritic oath.

One thing we do know about the Pharisees is that they strove to follow God’s law as rigorously as they could. This doesn’t make them hypocrites; it makes them religious. (p. 106)

It seems the cultural equation Pharisee = hypocrite must come from Matthew 23, where Matthew’s Jesus juxtaposes the terms 7 times within 17 lines (13, 14,15, 23, 25, 27, 29). Outside Matthew, the words appear together only once (Luke 11:44), again on Jesus’s lips.

Matthew’s is the most insistently Jewish of the gospels, not just Jewish, but rabbinic Jewish, i.e., Pharisaic. It is also, some have argued, the most anti-Jewish (though I think there are passages in John that might outstrip Matthew for vitriol).

When I was in college, the most venomous attacks I’d hear against black men came from the mouths of black women. If I quoted them to you out of context, you’d take it as racist “hate speech.” The context makes all the difference. I think Christianity becoming a gentile religion ended up taking a lot of this ancient Jewish infighting very much out of context.

At the Charlottesville City Market yesterday morning, I desperately wanted a cup of coffee. I bypassed the nearby coffeehouse thinking I should spend my money with one of the City Market’s weekend merchants. But all I found was “organic fair-trade” coffee. Nope. I’m not tithing to that religion. I like my coffee full of pesticides and produced with maximum exploitation.

Similarly, I like my housing to have maximum environmental impact, and yet, I sure do see the aesthetic appeal of this Welsh environmentalist’s “‘low-impact’ Woodland home,” taken from the pages of JRR Tolkein:

See more. (Thanks, Carolyn.)

In his interview with the New York Times on May 3, 2009, President Obama said,

I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, you know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with him or go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.

(via the Hannibal Blog, “Humor for pedants”)

An instant-message exchange after I recommended Bart D. Ehrman’s The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, which I listened to over the weekend:

BK

I read very little outside my job. All my "intake" is audio.

Carolyn

oh that’s right

I keep forgetting

you "read" all this sophisticated and complex stuff, I keep figuring it’s print

BK

heh

no

I keep encountering the claim in early-Christian history that most people who knew these texts were illiterate, but not necessarily uninterested. And so they’d have the texts read to them, usually in groups.

Other than the group part, that sounds like me and my iPhone.

I’m like a modern-day illiterate.

One benefit for Nathalie is that I volunteer to do pretty much anything that allows me to focus and listen: shopping, errands, dishes, dinner, yard work …

Gary North recommends carrying a book whenever you’re out in the world, so you don’t waste time standing in lines or sitting in waiting rooms. That’s what I do, minus the physical book.

I realized the other day that I was standing in an especially slow line at the store but didn’t bother switching since I was interested in what I was listening to.

Carolyn

right

I like the modern day illiterate claim

you should blog that

BK

will do

This is a must-read for anyone concerned about schooling:

[...] Of course, publishers prefer to face no objections at all. That’s why going through a major adoption, especially a Texas adoption, is like earning a professional certificate in textbook editing. Survivors just know things.

What do they know?

Mainly, they know how to censor themselves. Once, I remember, an editorial group was discussing literary selections to include in a reading anthology. We were about to agree on one selection when someone mentioned that the author of this piece had drawn a protest at a Texas adoption because he had allegedly belonged to an organization called the One World Council, rumored to be a “Communist front.”

At that moment, someone pointed out another story that fit our criteria. Without further conversation, we chose that one and moved on. Only in retrospect did I realize we had censored the first story based on rumors of allegations. Our unspoken thinking seemed to be, If even the most unlikely taint existed, the Gablers would find it, so why take a chance?

Self-censorship like this goes unreported because we the censors hardly notice ourselves doing it. In that room, none of us said no to any story. We just converged around a different story. The dangerous author, incidentally, was celebrated best-selling science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. [... KEEP READING]

(via Susan Wise Bauer)

Lew Rockwell writes,

To have an “immigration problem” is enormously flattering for a country. For that problem to go away is a dark cloud, a bad omen, a sign that something is going terribly wrong. The absence of an immigration problem can quickly turn into an emigration problem. FULL ARTICLE