Ancient Hebrew Poetry

The Institution of Elder in Russian Orthodoxy

Does the institution of “elder” as described by Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov still exist in Orthodoxy? Key graphs (from the recent translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, pages 27-29):

Reading The Brothers Karamazov with High School Sophomores

Classics Club is an initiative I operate jointly with an English teacher in the local high school. The initiative seeks to duplicate for others high school reading experiences I had which were intensely positive.

The high school I attended was a lab school of sorts, a brainchild of university professors and a talented set of public high school teachers who found the “system” too confining.

A Celebration of the Life of Lisa Marie Martin

Many people who visit this blog know that my first responsibility is not to the community of people who read this blog, but to the people of the rural Wisconsin countryside where I serve as a pastor. I do not see myself as the pastor of a bunch of churchgoers, but of an entire community. As John Wesley said, "The world is my parish." So it happens, because I maintain a public presence, that I am called on to take care of things in the case of people who have little or no connection with my congregation. Below the fold, the funeral sermon I am about to give. It is 6 p.m. The service is at 7. 51 college students from Iowa have just arrived. Since 3 p.m., a steady stream of hundreds and hundreds of people have been coming into the sanctuary to pay their respects to a beautiful young woman who captured the attention of those around her with the ease and glory of a monarch butterfly shining on a milkweed in the noonday sun.

Is Roman Catholic Doctrine a Helpful Guide in Shaping Public Policy?

Joe Biden thinks it is. He said on Thursday: “Catholic social doctrine as I was taught it is, you take care of people who need the help the most.” Hard to object to that.  Follow-up questions: how to help them best, and how to pay for that help. On those matters, reasonable people are known to disagree.

Catholic social doctrine is famously pro-life across the board. But Biden’s running mate came out in favor of the death penalty in the case of certain egregious sexual crimes. I wonder what a Catholic is supposed to think about that.

Note to Joe Biden: you may have heard a particular set of emphases when you were a kid, but things are different now. Time for an aggiornamento, an update. What does Catholic social doctrine  teach, currently, about the sanctity of life? Tell us more, please.

Happiness according to Psalm 146

According to Psalm 146, happiness belongs to the one who chooses the right deity. Happiness redounds to the person who finds that deity praiseworthy, and, it goes without saying, conforms his behavior to that deity’s ethical priorities. Such conformity is of the essence of all Torah observance.

Note to people who think the new covenant as prophesied by Jeremiah supersedes the old. It doesn’t. The new covenant is the old one written on the heart (Jer 31:33). As Psalm 119:2 puts it, “Happy are those who keep his precepts; // wholeheartedly do they seek him.”

Psalm 146 is crystal clear about who the God of Jacob is. To the question, who is God and what does he do for a living, the psalm gives eleven precise answers. The psalm praises God by pointing out praiseworthy facets of God’s being, each of which is imitable by those in Zion who regard her God to be their God. Below the fold, further comment, a prosodic presentation of the text in Hebrew, and interspersed translation.

Little Known Facts

(1) Adjusting for inflation, a gallon of gas cost $7 in 1950. (2) The Dow is up 44% in the last 10 years.

Americans have become a nation of whiners and bedwetters. The sky is always falling. If you will be so nice as to tell me in a comment which pair of presidential candidates promises less pie in the sky, rest assured, I will vote for them. I’m having a hard time telling who is full of less hot air in this campaign season.

American Civil Religion from Abraham Lincoln to Sarah Palin

Go here. I was particularly struck by FDR’s prayer.

Memories of Avraham Biran

Avraham Biran, the excavator of Tel Dan and other important sites, the Director of the Nelson Glueck School of Biblical Archaeology at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Israel since 1974, died on September 16, 2008 in Jerusalem. Here is a well-written obituary. (HT: Jim West)

Together with a group of students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison under the leadership of Prof. Keith Schoville, I remember well participating in excavations at Tel Dan with Biran as director in the summer of 1976. I was nothing more than a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed teenager, but Biran took me by the arm, shared anecdotes about what it was like to be a student of William Foxwell Albright, and communicated his passion for the land of Israel and the Bible.

Wise Words of a Rabbi and Faith-Healer: Hanina Ben-Dosa

Did you know that an important 1^st century rabbi was a saintly faith-healer known, not for halachic rulings, but for the efficacy of his intercessory prayer and his practical wisdom? His name: חנינא בן דוסא  -- Hanina Ben-Dosa.

A number of books and texts in the Hebrew Bible are didactic compositions which do not dwell on specific mitzvot (commandments) so much as on general principles of living acceptable to God and man. Prime examples: Proverbs, Job, and Qohelet, not to mention Psalms like 1 and 111 and 112.

But if you love Hebrew and you love life, you don’t want to stop there. Run along the stream of tradition a little further. Drink deeply from the ‘living water’ (Hebraism alert) downstream. This post introduces and comments on Avot 3.13.

Christian Carnival CCXLII

The Christian Carnival is a weekly collection of some of the best posts of the Christian blogosphere. It's open to Christians of Protestant, Orthodox, and Roman Catholic convictions. To be included, you are supposed to submit a post from the past week for consideration. Below the fold, I introduce the posts submitted in the last few days, and a few others as well.