A change of course

I’ve put away the Literary Study Bible, which was to have supplied half of my devotional reading for 2023 and 2024. The notes were too distracting and not insightful enough. Nuanced interpretations were closed off. Ham-fisted ones were asserted. But that may just be my own doctrinal bias rearing its head.

Put it this way, then. Seldom would the notes consider more than one interpretation. I don’t just mean that they’d fail to discuss contrasting theological approaches. I mean, they’d fail to do justice to literary disagreement as well. In a bible purporting to aid literary study, this is a disappointing feature.

Nevertheless, I’m continuing with the English Standard Version. I found a second-hand Lutheran ESV pew bible. The text is uncluttered. The back matter is by Señor Lutero himself.

Our family-time reading of the International Children’s Bible is going just fine. Do Karin & I pause to explain to Samuel and Daniel why the priests had to wear certain garments, or why the Israelites were supposed to sacrifice this but not that? Do we pause to explain these things to ourselves? We do not. We march on ahead. There is a lot of material to cover.

We gauge our success by whether Samuel latches on to a key phrase and repeats it a few times during the next days. Pleasing to the Lord is an example.

When that happens, it’s good literature doing what it’s supposed to do.

The vanilla method

Karin took two days off from work, and so we did quite a lot of shopping and appointment keeping.

At a thrift store, I bought eleven books.

We took Jasper to the vet’s for a follow-up appointment. When we brought him home, little Ziva again attacked him; but this time, we’d been advised by the vet to put vanilla on Ziva’s nose so that she wouldn’t smell Jasper’s oddness.

The tactic succeeded after three applications of vanilla. The kitties were kind to each other for the rest of the evening.

Today, Karin went to a friend’s house to bake cookies, and I stayed at home to read whatever I could about U.S. Senator and presidential aspirant Cory Booker (a New Jersey Democrat).

Liberal-leaning people of my age in South Bend are gung-ho about our mayor, Peter Buttigieg, whose forthcoming book depicts him rolling up his sleeves to repair our city (as if he himself were going to fill in the potholes). They want him to run for President. And, indeed, he’s just announced that he won’t seek mayoral reelection; it’s presumed he’ll aim higher.

I don’t know if I’d want Buttigieg or Booker to be the next U.S. President. If I were talking to Hank Hill, he’d tell me that both of these guys have too much “flash.” (I’d much rather have a leader like Bertie of The King’s Speech, which Karin & I watched last night: one who appreciates the burden of leadership well enough to stammer when confronted with it.) But it strikes me that Buttigieg and Booker are very alike with respect to ideology (centrist liberalism), formative background (well-to-do middle class; Ivy League; Oxford), and political experience (largely mayoral); only, under each category, Booker has the better credentials.

So, I say to my South Bend friends (if any of you read this): if you like Buttigieg, support Booker instead.

Otherwise, cast your net elsewhere.

(See, that’s the trouble with having studied moral philosophy: one finds oneself unable to make categorical recommendations; one can only make conditional ones. Vanilla. Earlier today, I was rereading Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will, which was in a collection I’d bought at the thrift store, and Luther was upbraiding Erasmus for exhibiting the same tendency, i.e., for not being unconditionally assertive. I don’t think Luther and I would have gotten along.)

A messed-up world

Tonight, Karin and I watched The Big Lebowski. … And right now, as I type this, I’m listening to one of its best songs: “Gnomus,” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This week, I had an especially good session with my eighth-grade tutee. We discussed the religious differences among Britain’s thirteen North American colonies. This required me to explain the relationship between being a Puritan and being a Protestant, which necessitated a survey of the Reformation.

First, I explained about Lutherans (led by Martin Luther) and Calvinists (led by John Calvin). “And then,” I said, “the English church also split away from the Roman Catholic church. This was so that King Henry VIII could divorce his wife.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

“Who was the leader of that church?”

“King Henry VIII. He also cut off some of his wives’ heads.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, I explained how Puritans and Quakers, among others, emerged from the Church of England.

“The Quakers settled in Pennsylvania. They allowed other Christians to settle in Pennsylvania, too.”

“Were different kinds of people allowed to settle in the other colonies?”

“Not all the colonies permitted more than one kind of Christian group. The Puritans kept Massachusetts pretty much just for the Puritans.”

“That’s messed up!”

“Yes.”

Then, we went over Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” – line by line, just about, because my tutee didn’t understand a lot of the vocabulary.

As she grasped the meaning of each sentence, she exclaimed: “That’s messed up!”

But I had trouble getting her to finish reading the story.

When she told me she’d gotten to the end, I asked her how the narrator had killed the old man.

“I don’t know.”

So we checked the relevant passage, and I told her what its words meant. “So,” I explained, “the narrator held the bed against the old man’s face until he couldn’t breathe anymore.”

“That’s messed up!”

“All right, now: where did the narrator hide the body?”

“I don’t know.”

For someone so taken with the messed-upness of the world in general, and of the story in particular, my tutee was remarkably incurious about the story’s major plot points.

Which, I thought, was a little messed up.