Of Printers and Patriarchs
This one is coming a little more quickly than usual, but Cool Things are backing up in my Cool Things Queue.
Philadelphia, 1797. Via Lucretia Baskin, and thanks to Jeremy Botts for pointing it out.
Once I heard someone say, in response to a sermon on the faith of Abraham, that it was easy for Abraham because God spoke directly to him. Who needs faith when you have that? But that person was forgetting something: Abraham didn’t really know who that voice was. He didn’t know who was speaking to him, who was commanding him, who was making promises to him. Surely he had his suspicions — but how could he be sure?
One of the few books I know that captures something of the mental and spiritual world of the Patriarchs is Frederick Buechner’s marvelous novel about Jacob, Son of Laughter. Here’s my favorite passage — one in which the figure we call God or The Lord or YHWH is called “the Fear”:
The unclean blood no longer clung to our hands, but the small gods clung still to our hearts. They clung with silver fingers, with fingerless hands of wood and baked clay. Like rats, the gods gibbered in our hearts about the rich gifts they have for giving to us. The gods give rain. The swelling udder they give and the sweet fig, the plump ear of grain, the ooze of oil. They give sons. To Laban they gave cunning. They give their names as the Fear, at the Jabbok, refused me his when I asked it, and a god named is a god summoned. The Fear comes when he comes. It is the Fear who summons. The gods give in return for your gifts to them: the strangled dove, the burnt ox, the first fruit. There are those who give them their firstborn even, the child bound to the altar for knifing as Abraham bound Isaac till the Fear of his mercy bade the urine-soaked old man unbind him. The Fear gives to the empty-handed, the empty-hearted, as to me from the stone stair he gave promise and blessing, and gave them also to Isaac before me, to Abraham before Isaac, all of us wanderers only, herdsmen and planters moving with the seasons as gales of dry sand move with the wind. In return it is only the heart's trust that the Fear asks. Trust him though you cannot see him and he has no silver hand to hold. Trust him though you have no name to call him by, though out of the black night he leaps like a stranger to cripple and bless.
From an essay of mine arguing that the creation of a conservative university is not the best solution to the very real problem of the American academy’s ideological monoculture:
The larger issue that proponents of a conservative university must face is that of intellectual diversity. Were a few conservative universities to pop up, we might indeed see a net increase of intellectual diversity in American higher education taken as a whole, taken as a single entity. But we would surely get even less intellectual diversity than we currently have within any given institution. This would not be an altogether unappealing future for people, like me, whose stated positions on religious and cultural matters make them unemployable in perhaps 98 percent of American colleges and universities. But would it be good for the country as a whole?
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Earthsea! And about to begin the Aeneid.
- Music: Daft Punk. Not sure why.
- Reading: Just re-read PKD’s Now Wait For Last Year for the first time since ... 1974, maybe? A time-travel experience like that of the book’s protagonist.
- Podcasts: None recently. Suffering not from Podcast Fatigue but rather Podcast Frustration. So far it’s a disappointing medium overall.
- Food: We finally got around to making that famous NYT recipe for no-knead bread, or rather Teri did. It’s amazingly good, with a strong crust and a tender crumb. I don't get how it works but it does!
- Drink: If you want something fun to drink with no calories to speak of, try putting a couple of shakes of Peychaud’s bitters into club soda.
