On Thumbs and Bibles and Stuff
Look, it’s Leonardo da Vinci’s thumbprint
“The Saint John’s Bible is the first handwritten, illuminated Bible of its scale in over 500 years. The Bible gets its name from the Benedictine abbey and university which commissioned it: Saint John’s Abbey and Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.... In 1995, Donald Jackson, Senior Scribe to Queen Elizabeth II, presented his lifelong dream to handwrite and illuminate the Bible to the abbey and university. In 1998, they commissioned Jackson to begin the project, and on Ash Wednesday in 2000, he drew the first words: ‘In the beginning’. Eleven years later (2011), Donald and his wife, Mabel, presented the final page of The Saint John’s Bible to the abbey and university.”
A Way With Words: The Power and Art of the Book at the Children’s Museum of the Arts. Take a look at a larger version of the above image here.
- Something I wrote in 2017: “When a society rejects the Christian account of who we are, it doesn’t become less moralistic but far more so, because it retains an inchoate sense of justice but has no means of offering and receiving forgiveness. The great moral crisis of our time is not, as many of my fellow Christians believe, sexual licentiousness, but rather vindictiveness. Social media serve as crack for moralists: there’s no high like the high you get from punishing malefactors. But like every addiction, this one suffers from the inexorable law of diminishing returns. The mania for punishment will therefore get worse before it gets better.” I fear I was correct.
- I had a few thoughts about Andrew Roberts’s new biography of Churchill.
- In the previous edition of this newsletter, I forgot to give credit to John Philpin on micro.blog for the hint that set me thinking about Hearst’s collections. Thanks, John!