To comment on The Good Book Club reading for today, I'm going back a day to pick up so as maybe better to show Mark's cleverness. As a storyteller, Mark has been called dull compared to Matthew and Luke, and I could not possibly disagree more. Mark is fascinating, he's like peeling an onion: every time I read, study, comment I realize something new. Mark is the perfect reading for the Epiphany Season, and I like/love Mark best of all. Anyway, today's story. Readers will remember Mark's stories of the synagogue ruler's dying daughter Talitha, and the poor woman who had been bleeding for twelve years, how Mark breaks the Talitha story in two and inserts the bleeding woman story in there. He does it to show time passing, to make us frantic about the little girl, and to show that Jesus, among other things, has power over both Time and Death. Some scholars have called this technique a Markan sandwich or, literarily more technical, an intercalation. It happens again...

* Along with his disciples, Jesus has arrived in Jerusalem to be there for the Passover festival. We don't know how far ahead of time he arrived, or how long their visit will be, but they had a long walking journey down from Galilee, so doubtless intend to remain quite a while, maybe even through Pentecost, which is fifty days after Passover.  They seem to be staying overnight in nearby Bethany and coming into the city and temple every morning for the day.  Where are they lodging? You may think they're at the home of Martha and Mary and their brother Lazarus, but this is Mark's story, and every writer has poetic license to tell his story as he will. In the case of our four canonical gospels, each tells his story according to what he's picked up from others, and in the oral traditions, and, in my mind, jotted down on yellow sticky notes to arrange in the sequence that makes most sense and best suits their agenda. In Mark's gospel maybe they're staying at the home...

Here's part of a new translation series, from Bible Hub, long one of the most valuable sources online for Bible study, with more coming from them over the next year and a half. I enjoy that it's "red letter" for a change.  Bible Hub has several presentation formats online already, here are four formats of The Good Book Club passage for today:  a word for word literal from Mark's NT Greek, that I always like to start out with, and often use for Sunday School class, which shows Mark's idiosyncrasies that we are aware of;  a smoothly flowing readers' edition in contemporary English but still a "translation" not a "paraphrase";  then the same translation but set up as a Study Bible and with links to cross-references for use online.  The fourth one (scroll down) is a Greek-English in word by word format instead of the usual interlinear style.  It may be that nobody but me is interested in all this, but I expect it to be useful for Bible stud...

Some things online and on Facebook are neater than others. This one is super neat. Too bad we here in 7H don't have a bird to entertain or a cat to tease! * Please note that you must click on the link to access the bird sounds * This is one of the best activities I have found in a while! With this site your child simply clicks on each bird to hear their unique song. This will remind them of the singing birds we have in our centre. 🐦 🦅 🦢  https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/.../bird_songs.../index.html Some things online are especially important, too, in a world that seems to be slipping out of civilization back into what? the jungle? the Stone Age? the age of what before gender correction was called Man's Inhumanity to Man. The Times of Israel is one of the middle eastern newspapers I receive by email, and read or at least scan - - as part of discovering what other people think and how they feel, their values. I do this also with NYT and WaPo and Fox News and CNN and oth...

Good Thursday! Instead of a Jesus picture, I'm starting out today with an apt pic that Madge found and posted on HNEC Facebook page: and second with a link to my earlier-posted +Time blog, https://plusmoretime.blogspot.com/2021/01/why-i-miss-church-so-much.html that I may be taking down in a day or so because I didn't obtain (or even seek as legally I probably should have) permission to copy-and-paste it. I posted the link on my own FB page but not on our parish FB page. If you've wondered why you've grown so lonely and felt so detached and even depressed over the past months of covid, this article may help you understand yourself and that it's perfectly normal under the circumstances.  And not only yourself, but part of what's been happening to us as a nation: somehow, instead of e pluribus unum, we're breaking apart into groups, factions, a term for it is "coming all unglued". The internet and social media enable and exacerbate it, and the insani...

A perceptive "take" on what's happening to us in our social isolation and avoidance, including those of us who, lifelong, have known church membership and involvement as the center and core of family and individual social life, as well as, for clergy and parish staff like me, daily work life. With apologies to Atlantic, a decades-long favorite along with The New Yorker magazine, I'll delete the article in a day or so, immediately if they challenge me on posting it. I simply copy-and-pasted it. Consequently, there are wide/long blank spots. But it's a long essay, as usual with Atlantic, so one simply has to keep scrolling down and reading until there is no more. (I added the word END at the very bottom.) T  SKIP TO CONTENT Site Navigation Popular Latest Sign In Subscribe HEALTH The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship There’s a reason you miss the people you didn’t even know that well. AMANDA MULL JANUARY 27, 2021 VALERIE CHIANG A few months ago, whe...