The black is good and, a square from a pound plus bar at TJs Tallahassee, the dark has almonds. Outside is clear and cool, good for this morning's walk in The Cove. See, I'm reading The Great War and Modern Memory (P Fussell 1975), the horror of World War One with its overwhelming sense of desolating senselessness, thousands upon thousands of soldiers, men, human beings  in well-finished permanent trenches fighting back and forth across a hundred-yard no-man's-land, their only discernible purpose to kill each other for no moral reason. To add reality to it, last evening I watched a number of newsreels, both German and English, then to Youtube to open All Quiet on the Western Front first 1930 but that was pocked by the bright light mid-screen to discourage freeloaders like me, then to the 1979 film with Ernest Borgnine and Richard Thomas, soul crushing. Not to turn to this morning's news of war that will never end, ants killing ants of the next mound in an infini...

Written perhaps a half-century after the fact and not unlikely taking up exciting stories that were circulating, Luke's lively account of the conversion of Saul is more detailed than what Saul/Paul himself says at Galatians 1 and 1 Corinthians 15. No matter, it's Luke's story, and preachers across the Christian ages, including myself, have been inspired to imaginative sermons about Paul on the Road to Damascus.  The most memorable one I remember was by Dr. Bob Jones, that I listened to on my car radio while driving cross country on business, must have been about 1980, a couple years after my Navy retirement. It was moving and inspiring and stuck with me for several years until I found myself capturing the spirit and much of the content of it while in my first pulpit, as a transitional deacon at our church in Pennsylvania. My feelings about all of it may have been stirred by knowing that the first, Dr. Bob Jones, Sr.   had founded Bob Jones College at Lynn Hav...

Up a little earlier than I care for, two-something, couldn't go back to sleep, so okay, I showed up again today, thank you God. Opened the computer and read some. Geranium Farm with Bramantino's Risen Christ just up, still in his burial shroud, and RevBarbara's sharp eye for detail.   Smithsonian.com daily, about a surprise sizable asteroid that buzzed by too close while I was sleeping last Sunday morning;  about last year's discovery and identification of UB-29,   a WW1 Unterseeboot  lying, since December 1916, some 80 feet deep in the English Channel 12 miles off Ostend on the Belgian coast; about the house in Detroit where GeneralPresident U S Grant lived for a while with his bride Julia Dent in 1849 until she became pregnant and fled home to StLouis. The house is up for possible restoration. "If you can idolize Grant, why mustn't we idolize General Lee?" is my early morning question, but the answer is simpletonian: the winner is ...

For any number of reasons, this is one of my favorite Acts stories, and one I always enjoy discussing in Sunday School or my old midweek Bible Seminars. It'd all be perfectly clear to any Jews who might read Luke's report, but I wonder whether Theophilus "got it," and even whether Luke himself did, assuming Luke to have been writing as a gentile. Of course, if the story is entirely of Luke's composition, he would or should have understood, but regardless, the story is wonderfully, glaringly subtle.  The Ethiopian eunuch, perhaps a Jew or at least of the θεοσέβής "God-worshipers" or "God-fearer" gentiles who behaved jewishly, has made pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship at temple; but in accord with Jewish law, and grievously hurtful to him personally, as a "cut male" he is unacceptable, forbidden full access to temple worship. Luke's double-entendre is clear: castrated, the man is cut off from his people, can have no future gener...

An essay yesterday on Geranium Farm, Barbara Crafton reportedly having finished her book and resuming her writing, stirred my memory and touched my heart. In this instance the song more than her writing, but both really, her writing brilliant, almost uniquely so, and I’m glad she’s back.  The song was “I’ll Fly Away” (A E Brumley, 1929). I’m not sure, we may have sung it as teenagers at Camp Weed, Carrabelle, Florida in those 1950s days that someone trying to be poetic might call halcyon , like cool spring mornings and warm, sunny afternoons of peace before the First World War; setting aside, overlooking or completely forgetting the bad and remembering only the good; a sign of a healthy mind perhaps.  But the song. Maybe I used to hear it on radio or watch it on Sunday morning b&w television in earlier days, not sure. Guitar is okay, but for best it wants a rinky-tink piano, at least one fiddle, for sure a banjo, and one or more singers with a nasal twang: I'll Fl...

Although later legend, or tradition, arises about him, these few verses from Acts are all we "know" about Simon the Magician, for whom is named "simony," buying religious office for personal benefit. Growing out of the event described in today's reading, a terrible reputation developed in the early church for poor Simon, who after all was only trying to put bread on the table. The below link from Catholic Encyclopedia expands, expounds, for anyone who would like to know more.   http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13797b.htm And oh, may Simon Magus fairly be regarded as a spiritual father of evangelical preachers in giant megachurches of today? IDK http://babylonbee.com/news/benny-hinn-carefully-applies-not-world-sticker-ferrari-458-italia/ Note that, per Luke's agenda, the early church continues to originate and develop from Jerusalem, home of the prophets. Acts 8:9-25 Simon Magus  Now a certain man named Simon had previously practised magic in th...

Usually so far in our Easter Season reading Luke's book of the Acts of the Apostles, I'm including the daily Acts reading within my daily blogpost, but not necessarily, and little or nothing is   always, always an d never being as anathema as certainty : never happen. This morning is different for no particular reason, it's just so. Today's reading opens with Saul approving of Stephen being stoned to death, and going from there, including introducing Philip, not the apostle, they are in Jerusalem. Interestingly (or not, your choice), Philip goes "down" to Samaria, which contrasts to our view that going north would be going "up" - - but to those in Luke's time, everything would be going "up" to Jerusalem perhaps just as we might say "I'm going up to Washington" even if we are starting out from Boston. It's not a geographic, but more a hierarchical point of view. We shall shortly hear more of Philip the deacon.     Ac...