Rereading Huxley, Brave New World, is setting my intellectual heart on fire. I cannot remember what I thought in 1989, the last time I read this classic, for my thoughts are somewhere buried in my voluminous files, the book now a timely and relevant warning and satire in today's distopian present. I am laughing, howling is a better word, in righteous mirth, in the opening pages, satirically mocking current science and technology, right out of today's internet. Well done, Mr. Huxley!

 

Like Tennessee Ernie Ford I mythically loaded 16 tons this morning owing my soul to the company store to cap off Eliot's cruelest month, intending to keep it going this morning by listening to some Johnny Cash and Tommy James and the Shondels, I think we're alone now, and I'm proud to say like W Mission Accomplished.  Now looking for new worlds to conquer to finish up another April.  Maybe a Krispy Kreme even a croissant and fish sticks for lunch to send April out in style.  We'll see what the rest of April brings.

Capitulation

 I set a an intellectual goal this morning of using the following words properly in polite conversation without talking to myself: scatalogically, sociologically, and paradoxically. So far, no luck. Wish me luck. P.S. Just added one more: capitulation, popular in Tuscaloosa at the moment.

 If Can he say that? was a broad theme of Trump’s first term, Can he do that? is the even graver theme of his second. The deportations. The tariffs. The dismantling of the civil service, of scientific research, of government records, of civil rights, of voting rights, of basic standards of due process: The president’s efforts to destabilize his own government from within—to defund agencies, to “purge” the civil service of people he views as insufficiently loyal—have not merely been escalations of the attempted power grabs he made in his first term. They have been direct assaults on the delicate balance of power: an executive laying siege to the legislative and judicial branches. Lippmann did not predict this turn of events, but he understood their consequences. Democracy, under the sway of lies, becomes a form of anarchy.

-Megan Garber in The Atlantic

 If you are on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of science, the wrong side of common sense in favor of ideology, & the wrong side of religion, then you are on the wrong side.

 Lincoln’s Peace 

by Michael Vorenberg (Knopf)

Nonfiction

Vorenberg, a historian, picks up the story of the Civil War at the end of the conflict, as it was drawing to a close after unfathomable death and suffering. Vorenberg’s account, despite the intervening carnage, returns us to a situation eerily similar to the one that preceded the war; the white South, though militarily defeated, had no intention of accepting anything resembling racial equality. And, while Robert E. Lee might have declined to resort to guerrilla warfare, many of his lieutenants carried on a program of suppression by terror. In that sense, Vorenberg argues, the Civil War never truly ended.

 

As long as I wake up every morning and remain sentient I am a lifelong learner although I hasten to add that what I wish to learn more about has no doubt changed a lot over time, but that is normal and to be expected. After all, what interested me in 1973 is probably not what I wish to know more about in 2025.

Talk

There used to be so much talk of digital natives.  But what about print natives?  No one talks about us.

Take Away

 Take away email and the internet and I'd get my focus back. Fat chance of that happening unless days and hours are planned out to turn it off & to not look period.

 An advantage of being historically minded is to be mindful of that which is derivative and that which seems to be original. To be able to understand context and what is truly new and what has antecedents. Today does not suddenly spring up from nowhere. It all started from about 13.8 billion yrs ago.

Back when I had the energy, I didn't have the time. Now that I have the time, I do not have the energy. It don't seem fair. 

Secession Was Illegal

 The Civil War is often described as a conflict between “the Union” and “the Confederacy,” with two competing groups of states that were organized under two different “national” governments. Legally speaking, however, the Confederate States of America never existed. No foreign government ever recognized it as an independent country. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1869 case Texas v. White that secession had been unconstitutional and that the “Confederate states,” including Virginia, never actually left the Union during the Civil War.

Matt Ford in The New Republic

Later Than You Think

 The Trump administration’s breakneck pace is obviously no accident. While citizens are busy processing their shock over any one shattered norm or disregarded law, Trump is already on to the next one. This is the playbook authoritarians have used all over the world: First the leader removes those with expertise and independent thinking from the government and replaces them with leaders who are arrogant, ignorant, and extremely loyal. Next he takes steps to centralize his power and claim unprecedented authority. Along the way, he conducts an all-out assault on the truth so that the truth tellers are distrusted, corruption becomes the norm, and questioning him becomes impossible. The Constitution bends and then finally breaks. This is what tyrants do. Trump is doing it now in the United States.

People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.

-Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic

Bart Ehrman on Galations

 

Galatians in a Nutshell

April 20, 2025

Galatians in a Nutshell

 

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is one of the most important and intriguing books of the New Testament, in parts not difficult to understand and in other parts densely packed with meaning, and therefore heavily disputed (check out Galatians 2:17-19 or 3:19-20 some time; if you think either is obvious, I can assure you your obvious interpretation is very much disputed!).  It is only six chapters long, but there’s a lot in there.   I had a friend in graduate school who wrote an entire dissertation to unpack just one verse (3:1).

How to summarize it in one sentence of 50 words?  If you’re familiar with the book, give it a shot.  Here’s one attempt at it:

Paul’s letter to the Galatians strenuously argues that being right with God comes to all people, Jew and gentile, only by faith in Christ, not by doing what the laws of Moses requires of Jews as the people of God, such as circumcision and observing sabbath and Jewish holy days. 

I can now try to unpack this in a somewhat larger “nutshell.”

Paul’s letter to the Galatians is written in white-hot anger, unlike virtually all his other surviving writings (except the fragmentary letter of 2 Corinthians 10-13).  This is his only letter that does not begin with Paul thanking God for his readers.  It instead begins with astonishment: he cannot believe that the converts in his church(es) of Galatia have abandoned his preaching about Christ to follow a different understanding of the faith.

Whereas Paul’s other letters are directed to churches of specific cities, this one is addressed to churches of the large region of Galatia, which extended from north to south in central Asia Minor (modern Turkey).

Paul had established churches throughout the region by converting one-time pagans and had instructed them that it was only the death and resurrection of Jesus that could bring them in a right standing before God.  But other Christian missionaries had come in his wake who insisted that since Jesus was the Jewish messiah sent to fulfill the Jewish scriptures, it was obviously necessary for his followers to convert to Judaism and follow the law given to the chosen people.

For men that would require circumcision; for men and women it would entail keeping keeping sabbath, Jewish festivals, presumably kosher food laws.   If you want to be among the chosen ones, you need to do what the chosen ones are supposed to do!

Paul’s himself was a one-time law-committed highly-religious Jew, so he understands the issues full well.  And is completely incensed at the idea.  If the law of Moses could make a person right with God, there would have been no reason for God to send his son to die for the sins of the world.  You could just keep the law.

Paul’s relatively brief but highly intense letter can be roughly divided into three parts:

(a) Autobiographical (chs. 1-2): Paul demonstrates that he has the one and only authoritative understanding of the Gospel of Christ by explaining how he learned of it and how the other apostles came to agree with him.

(b) Theological (chs. 3-4); he uses scriptural arguments based mainly on the life of the father of the Jews, Abraham, to show that God had all along planned to save people by faith, not by doing the works of the law.

(c) Ethical (chs. 5-6); Paul then shows that this “lawfree” gospel (justification apart from the law) does not lead to “lawless” behavior; on the contrary, only those who are followers of Christ who have thereby received the Holy Spirit are the ones who are able to live the lives that God demands.

The opening two chapters are remarkable within Paul’s letters, giving by far the most information about his earlier life, as he explains how he went from being a determined, hard-core religious Jew who had persecuted the followers of Jesus to becoming one of their number.  It happened through a revelation of Christ that God himself had given him.  This is where Paul learned his “gospel.”  This “good news” is not simply that Christ’s death and resurrection is what brings “justification” (a “right standing” with God) but also the further corollary that since Christ is the way of salvation, there is no other.   Paul’s own Jewish upbringing and zeal for the law was not sufficient for him to be “right” with God.

Once Paul came to believe this, he realized there were two major implications.  The first was that the law of Moses never had been intended as the way to be righteous before God, unlike what he had always assumed.  The value of the law was that it informed God’s people how to behave and more or less kept them in line until the time that salvation in Christ would appear.  It was like a disciplinarian who tried to control people’s wicked impulses that were fueled by evil powers in the world tempting them to sin.

The problem with the law is that it told people how to behave, but it did not given them the power to do so.  As a result, everyone was a transgressor of the very law that they tried to keep to be or be right with God. And that meant the law which revealed God’s will actually became a curse for his people.

Second, as a result the law therefore could play no instrumental role in salvation, and was never meant to do so.  The payoff is that there was no payoff for non-Jews to try to keep the law of the Jews in order to be saved.  Paul never condemns the law per se, or urges his fellow Jews to stop keeping it.  They really were and are the chosen ones: they are they ones to whom God revealed himself; and God’s directives to them about how to live still apply. But adopting the ways of Judaism could not bring salvation.  Only Christ, the fulfillment of God’s promises in the Hebrew Bible, could.

That in turn means that any former pagan who is now a follower of Christ makes a very big mistake in thinking that it is useful to convert to Judaism and keep the Jewish laws.  Useful for what?  It can’t establish a person’s standing before God or make them righteous before God.  The law is for Jews.  They are the chosen people.  But they are chosen to be the ones to whom God revealed himself; they are not necessarily saved because they were chosen.  Even though they were chosen to learn God’s will, now his will is shown to all people, Jew and gentile.

As a result, any gentile who follows Jesus who thinks she or he also needs to observe the law is not just a bit misguided.  They have completely misunderstood the gospel.  Salvation comes by Christ; observing the law has nothing to do with it.

That means that men who are submitting to the rather risky operation of circumcision are not merely doing something, well, painfully unnecessary.  They show they do not understand the gospel and therefore do not really have faith in Christ (thinking they need something more in addition to faith).  They are in danger of losing their salvation.

Paul argues that Abraham,  the father of the Jews, was made right with God by faith.  To prove it, Paul quotes Genesis 15:6, “Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness.”  It was faith in what God said, not by doing anything, that Abraham was justified before God.  Only later did God give him the “sign of the covenant,” circumcision (in Genesis 17).  This shows that justification comes without circumcision, and is not earned by doing any of God’s demands.

God had promised Abraham and Sarah offspring, but that did not mean the Jewish people.  It meant one person, who would fulfill the promise, Christ himself.

Paul indicates that he had talked with the Jerusalem apostles before him (Peter, James, etc.) in detail and that they agreed with his views of the matter.

He goes on to stress that those who believe in Christ are set free from the powers that force people to sin, and from the law, which brings condemnation because people invariably break it.  That does not mean, though, that people who believe in Christ will lead lawless lives.  Quite the contrary, followers of Jesus have the Spirit of God in them, guiding their lives, allowing them to do all the things God wants them to do.  Without the Spirit, people live “according to the flesh,” engaged in all sorts of sinful activities (even if they are Jewish); but with the Spirit people live “according to the Spirit,” in full control of their godly activities and living live of love and care for others.

The other missionaries who preach otherwise are therefore false preachers, and the Galatian Christians need to commit themselves to lives of love in the Spirit, rather than take on the concerns of the Jewish law.

This is a letter with a fairly simple overall message, and a sometimes dense set of theological arguments to explain it, one of the most important and influential writings to come down to us from of early Christianity.

 Heather Souvaine Horn

/

April 18, 2025/5:30 a.m. ET

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Get Ready for Expensive Tomatoes and Lots of Food Contamination

The Trump administration’s tariffs, funding freezes, and deregulation could spell chaos not just for farmers and consumers but also for food safety.The New Republic

 

Hitler’s Terrible Tariffs

By seeking to “liberate” Germans from a globalized world order, the Nazi government sent the national economy careening backwards—and drove up the price of eggs 600 percent.

By Timothy W. Ryback in The Atlantic

The First Amendment

 

The First Amendment (in case we've forgotten)

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

My reading is that free exercise thereof does not mean the right to lawfully impose your religious beliefs on other citizens.

Clear on Trump

 Above all, the tariffs have made clear how all of Trump’s policies fit together: Every step he takes is aimed at concentrating the power of government in his own hands as he seeks to intimidate opponents and move aggressively to eliminate alternative sources of public influence in the legal system, the universities, and the media.

-E.J.Dion in the The New Republic

Trump Failures

 

By any reasonable measure, President Donald Trump’s first 100 days will be judged an epic failure.

He has been a legislative failure. He has signed only five bills into law, none of them major, making this the worst performance at the start of a new president’s term in more than a century.

He has been an economic failure. On his watch, growth has slowed, consumer and business confidence has cratered, and markets have plunged, along with Americans’ wealth. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that “growth has slowed in the first quarter of this year from last year’s solid pace” and that Trump’s tariffs will result in higher inflation and slower growth.

He has been a foreign-policy failure. He said he would end wars in Gaza and Ukraine. But fighting has resumed in Gaza after the demise of the ceasefire negotiated by his predecessor, and Russia continues to brutalize Ukraine, making a mockery of Trump’s naive overtures to Vladimir Putin.

He has been a failure in the eyes of friends, having launched a trade war against Canada, Mexico, Europe and Japan; enraged Canada with talk of annexation; threatened Greenland and Panama; and cleaved the NATO alliance.

He has been a failure in the eyes of foes, as an emboldened China menaces Taiwan, punches back hard in the trade war and spreads its global influence to fill the vacuum left by Trump’s retreat from the world.

He has been a constitutional failure. His executive actions, brazen in their disregard for the law, have been slapped down more than 80 times already by judges, including those appointed by Republicans. He isflagrantly defying a unanimous Supreme Court, and his appointees are facing contempt proceedings for their abuse of the legal system.

He has been a failure in public opinion. This week’s Economist/YouGov poll finds 42 percent approving his performance and 52 percent disapproving — a 16-point swing for the worse since the start of his term. Majorities say the country is on the wrong track and out of control.

-Dana Milbank in the WaPost

 

Taking 2 Corinthians to Pieces….

April 16, 2025

I’ve mentioned several times in these posts on 2 Corinthians that scholars are reasonably confident that it is made up of two letters of Paul that have been cut and spliced together (chs. 10-13 was the first chronologically; chs. 1-9 later), and I’ve pointed out that some think it is made up of four or five letters.  It seems that since I’m on the topic, and will not be again for a long while, I should repost a blog that I’ve done within living memory (as opposed to twelve years ago) since it deals directly with the topic.

Before explaining the situation, I should say that when I first heard in graduate school that 2 Corinthians was made up of five different letters, all spliced together, it struck me as a bit crazy, but as I looked at the evidence I began to see that it made a good bit of sense.

I should also say that if what is now one letter is actually parts of five letters, written at different times and in different circumstances, and one naturally want to know what it would even mean to ask “What is the Original” of this epistle?  There are several plausible answers (e.g., there are “five” originals — but if so, we don’t have any of them; or the “original” is the first edition of the five cut and spliced together — but if so the “original” is actually based on earlier originals! etc…).  Some readers will think one of the plausible answer is “right” — but others will think another one is right!

(Incidentally: a reader has asked me whether any of the letters allegedly found in 2 Corinthians could have originally been written by someone other than Paul.  You’ll see here that this is widely believed by scholars for one small chunk of the letter.  On this particular question, there is a much larger critical agreement on the matter, though not complete consensus).

I have taken this discussion again from my textbook, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings (Oxford University Press).

******************************

 

The Partitioning of 2 Corinthians - Bart Ehrman

A number of New Testament scholars believe that 2 Corinthians comprises not just two of Paul’s letters but four or five of them, all edited together into one larger composition for distribution among the Pauline churches. Most of the “partition theories,” as they are called (since they partition the one letter into a number of others), maintain that chapters 1–9 are not a unity but are made up of several letters spliced together. Read the chapters for yourself and answer the following questions:

• Does the beginning of chapter 8 appear to shift abruptly to a new subject, away from the good news Titus has just brought Paul (about the reconciliatory attitude of the Corinthians) to Paul’s decision to send Titus to collect money for the needy among the Christians? There is no transition to this new subject, and 8:1 sounds like the beginning of the body of a letter. Could it have been taken from a different writing?
• Do the words of 9:1 seem strange after what Paul has said in all of chapter 8? He has been talking for twenty-four verses about the collection for the saints, and then in 9:1 he begins to talk about it again as if it were a new subject that had not yet been broached. Could chapter 9 also, then, have come from a separate letter?
• Does the paragraph found in 6:14–7:1 seem odd in its context? The verse immediately preceding it (6:13) urges the Corinthians to be open to Paul, as does the verse immediately following it (7:2). But the paragraph itself is on an entirely different and unannounced topic: Christians should not associate with nonbelievers. Moreover, there are aspects of this passage that appear unlike anything Paul himself says anywhere else in his writings. Nowhere else, for example, does he call the Devil “Beliar” (v. 15). Has this passage come from some other piece of correspondence (possibly one that Paul didn’t write) and been inserted in the midst of Paul’s warm admonition to the Corinthians to think kindly of him?

If you answered yes to all three of these questions, then you agree with those scholars who see fragments of at least five letters in 2 Corinthians: (a) 1:1–6:13; 7:2–16 (part of the conciliatory letter); (b) 6:14–7:1 (part of a non-Pauline letter?); (c) 8: 1–24 (a letter for the collection, to the Corinthians) (d) 9:1–15 (a letter for the collection, to some other church?); and (e) 10:1–13:13 (part of the painful letter).

Easy and Not so Easy

 

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It's easy to figure HIM out. What is not easy to figure out are the people who continue to follow and support him blindly. My only guide are the theoreticians of Fascism who show us how it works with willing followers.

 Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can pierce my fragile heart.

 

I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein Hardcover – April 1, 2025 

by  Kieran Fox Ph.D.  (Author)

5.0 5.0 out of 5 stars     (2)

See all formats and editions

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A "beautifully written" (David Fideler) spiritual biography of Albert Einstein that reveals for the first time the scientific and religious origins of his personal philosophy — "a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the mind of the great physicist" (Jo Marchant)

Albert Einstein remains renowned around the world for revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos, but very few realize that the celebrated scientist had a deep spiritual side. Einstein believed that one wondrous force was woven through all things everywhere—and this sense of the pervasive sacred influenced every aspect of his existence, from his marvelous science to his passionate pacifism.
 
I Am a Part of Infinity offers the first in-depth exploration of Einstein’s spirituality, showing how he drew on a dazzling diversity of thinkers—from Pythagoras to Plato, Schopenhauer to Spinoza, the Upanishads to Mahatma Gandhi—to create a novel system where mysticism met mathematics, reality was revered, and the human mind was honored as a mirror of the infinite. This wasn’t just a new way of seeing the world. Einstein asked us to commune with the cosmos, to treat every living creature with compassion, to channel the power that permeated all things and put it to use for pure purposes.
 
Drawing on little-known conversations, recently published letters, and new archival research, I Am a Part of Infinity reveals what Einstein really believed and why his perspective still matters today.