"The ancient Hebrew narrator displays his omniscience with a drastic selectivity...he leads us through varying darknesses which are lit up by intense but narrow beams, phantasmal glimmerings, sudden strobic flashes...there is, in other words, an abiding mystery in character [in the Bible]

Good things can happen share.inquirer.com/8jDkQN

“The human figures in the large biblical landscape act as free agents out of the impulses of a memorable and often fiercely assertive individuality, but the actions they perform all ultimately fall into the symmetries and recurrences of God’s comprehensive design”

Ok, here’s 10 Bob Dylan Mavis Staples Drive-By Truckers Jason Isbell Plains Wednesday Tyler Childers Bombino Wild Pink John Moreland

Jack Johnson Coldplay Mumford Avett Bros Dylan (2x) Willie Nelson Mavis Staples Robert Plant / Allison Krauss MJ Lenderman (3x) Plains Drive-By Truckers My Morning Jacket Granddaddy Fust John Moreland Greg Freeman Wednesday Tyler Childers Bombino Isbell Sturgill Lee Baines Courtney Marie Andrews

“Jacob is a man who sleeps on stones, speaks in stones, wrestles with stones, contending with the hard unyielding nature of things, whereas, in pointed contrast, his favored son will make his way in the world as a dealer in the truths intimated through the filmy insubstantiality of dreams”

Perfect Days: Wim Wenders has done it again

Just had it confirmed that it’s the Lattimore translation.

“The biblical tale, through the most rigorous economy of means, leads us again and again to ponder complexities of motive and ambiguities of character because these are essential aspects of its vision of man, created by God, enjoying or suffering all the consequences of human freedom”

"In many cases a literary student of the Bible [may have] more to learn from traditional commentaries than from modern scholarship" because "with their assumption of interconnectedness" they are "exquisitely attuned" to "small verbal signals of continuity and "significant lexical nuances"

Made a playlist for the part of spring when it's warmer but muddy and grey and the trees are still bare. Snoozeheads, tea fiends, melancholiacs, easy-criers: come on in tidal.com/playlist/b47...

“He seemed to take up no room at all; he was like the piece of grease-proof paper that divides biscuits in a tin” -Graham Greene, The Quiet American

“It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects; it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings” -Graham Greene, The Quiet American

"It was a foolish policeman's question, unworthy of the man who read Pascal, unworthy also of the man who so strangely loved his wife." An ultimate Graham Greene sentence in "The Quiet American"

“The Bible has no rivals when it comes to the art of omission" (Calasso); in the Bible “much may be apprehended, but nothing is explained" (Marilynne Robinson); biblical style "remains mysterious and 'fraught with background'" (Auerbach)

“The seventh day is like a palace in time with a kingdom for all. It is not a date but an atmosphere” -Abraham Joshua Heschel, quoted in “Sinai and Zion” by Jon Levenson

“A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly."

The principal preoccupation of almost everybody in the 1930s was getting by, and the humor, as during a blitz, was rueful and concerned with the imminence of individual disaster. —A. J. Liebling, foreword to The Most of A. J. Liebling

“[For Biblical Israel] History, the area of public events (as opposed to private, mystical revelation and to philosophical speculation), and time are not illusions or distractions from essential realty. They are means to the knowledge of God.” -Jon D. Levenson, Sinai and Zion

“Seeing how all things hold together in Christ means having catholicity (universality or broadness) of vision" peterblair.substack.com/p/a-right-st...

“Studious people, however, don’t want to master the whole world. They want to steward what they love.” open.substack.com/pub/peterbla...

Good afternoon www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJwt...

On loop today. Ramble on. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca3V...

"For Newman, then, it is when we let our particular biggest temptations or vices fester that we risk corrupting 'our whole spirit and judgement in all things.’” peterblair.substack.com/p/a-right-st...

“The book of Genesis is framed by two stories of remarkable forgiveness, of Cain by the Lord, and of his ten brothers by Joseph” -Marilynne Robinson, “Reading Genesis”

“The book of Genesis begins with the emergence of Being in a burst of light and ends with the death and burial of a bitter, homesick man” -Marilynne Robinson, “Reading Genesis”

“Now that we have split the atom and spliced the gene and sent a kind of emissary into interstellar space we may have some idea of the possibilities the Lord saw adumbrated in the aspirations of early humankind.” -Marilynne Robinson on the Tower of Babel (“Reading Genesis”)

"I got the guiltiest conscience/ Listening for a savior on a Saturday night/ I got my ear to the ground/You got Easter Sunday in your eyes" open.spotify.com/track/3OySUz...

Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor

Robinson making a similar point to Calasso “To assign causes to events is clearly not the method or intention of biblical narrative. We don’t know why Abel’s offering was acceptable and Cain’s was not, why Jacob was favored over Esau or Israel over the nations” (“Reading Genesis”)

“It is striking how the scale of thought has contracted with the loss of serious theology. A contemporary Kant or Hegel would find little purchase in the vocabulary of thought allowed to us now” -Marilynne Robinson, “Reading Genesis”

“This narrative sequence [of the early chapters of Genesis] establishes a profiling & essential assertion of the sacred good, making pangs and toil a secondary reality, likewise the punitive taking of life” -Robinson channeling the privatio boni at the start of Reading Genesis

Good afternoon www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKEQ...

Really sad to hear this, both of the closing and Rolf's cancer diagnosis. One of my favorite stores in Philly share.inquirer.com/SzazEj

"He'd not liked the peacetime army and it was understandable, there was no place in it for a man with a paperback edition of Kierkegaard in his pocket" -Len Deighton, the Ipcress File

Happy opening day to those who celebrate open.spotify.com/track/1Y3VFY...

In and around the Shawangunks (including New Paltz haulz)

“He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it” -Len Deighton, The Ipcress File

Good evening open.spotify.com/album/1NvW80...

Len Deighton, spy novelist and author of The Ipcress File, dies aged 97

John Moreland

“All did not go well with this democratic approach: division arose between the Americans and the British over the name for God.” -Bruce Gordon on a 19th century attempt to translate the Bible into Chinese (The Bible: A Global History)

Jane Kenyon

Good morning open.spotify.com/track/1dhosP...

Spring albums: Graceland, Father of the Bride, Shore

New season has got to begin I can feel it leaning in, whispering open.spotify.com/track/6pRIJ3...

“Whereas earlier revisions [of the KJV] had focused on typos, efforts were now focused on improving the translations. Not all went well. The most outrageous misfire came in 1631 with the so-called Wicked Bible, in which a crucial ‘not’ was omitted from the seventh commandment”

Wings of Desire (1987)

"Another [fossil] find, near Albany, NY, was recorded by Cotton Mather, who argued in a letter to the Royal Society in London that they were the bones of the Nephilim...for Mather, the discovery confirmed that...key stories in the OT had actually taken place in the Americas"