Friday, March 30, 2012

Why the Bible Should Not Be Unweirded (as with Thomas Jefferson's Famous Endeavor with the Scissors)

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In his book The Hidden Jesus, Donald Spoto speaks of passages of Scripture that are "indeed troublesome and embarrassing, but they ought not to be excised on that account...Censoring the Bible leads many people to believe that what is finally read ought to be accepted literally; that everything is set down to imitated; and that ancient writings can be read in precisely the same way as modern ones. This attitude, of course, is disastrous. It fails to understand that all human language is metaphor, and that the Word of God is set down in the words of men; these are by definition always limited words, conditioned by the exigencies of grammar, culture, history, politics, social factors....Not every position taken by an author of the Bible is inspired; it is the experience of the people of God that is inspired or guided--and the faith that is the result."

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"Faces Are Motion"

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Ten Second Essay #138:

Faces are motion, which is why all the photos of you are bad. Even the most natural-looking portrait is a sentence interrupted, one note of an aria, held. Though faces themselves hide a deeper motion. You seem to sit there and meet my eyes across the table, but you are so many other places, clinging here for a moment against all the currents that will soon sweep you onward. We are so moved by the faces caught in the windows of trains going the other way because they tell us how all faces really are.

— James Richardson By the Numbers

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