I'm having way too much fun reading Aristotle's Politics and spotting the passages that clearly influenced Dante, via Aquinas, so I made myself a new 16-bit Street-Fighter-style phone wallpaper to celebrate

We should change the church calendar to add a new Sunday: "Second Naiveté Sunday"—the Sunday when all the biblical studies scholars in the congregation are gone for SBL

Type of guy whose primary reason for reading Aristotle is for the Dante references (me)

I'm enjoying Benjamin Jowett's translation of Aristotle, but it is rendered in a mellifluous and stately 19th century English. I'm wondering if anyone has attempted to translate Aristotle more recently in a way that preserves more of the grit and gristle of Aristotle's Greek?

We need to reckon more seriously with the question of what, exactly, the "end" of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament is.

Okay I was trying to resist getting Adele Berlin's new Song of Songs commentary but I see that a central part of her reading is *heavy* Greek influence—she calls it "a Jewish-Hellenistic work"—and now I HAVE to read it

burned the sauce just a bit and ended up really liking the result. This is what Kant meant about the crooked timber of humanity

If someone sent me an email like this I would legitimately quake in fear

I've been slowly teaching myself how to play clarinet and having a ball. I'm up to 11 notes.

So my view of Hobbes was all wrong? Apparently he had already formed most of his core ideas of political philosophy *before* witnessing the horrors of the English Civil War??

Hobbes: Metaphor is "less dangerous" than the names of things, because metaphors "profess their inconstancy," while names do not.

“My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.” —Thomas Hobbes

After Hannah sings about the Lord lifting people up at the beginning of the Book of Samuel, is the only instance of "resurrection" the ironic "raising" of Samuel by the witch?

Starting to think that Hobbes may be the original out-of-touch AI bro! He opens his book by saying that humans are robots, the state is a robot, imagination is the brain slowly failing, metaphor is abuse of language, and numbers are the most truthful register of human thought.

I was quite honestly not expecting to loathe Thomas Hobbes this much! Here he is, saying that metaphor (yes, metaphor) is one of the four principal “abuses” of language.

What do we think Samuel is doing in I Samuel 7? In preaching, he is clearly a prophet. In offering sacrifices, he sure looks like he is commandeering the office of priest. In providing executive and military leadership, he is approaching the office of king, though not quite.

This is the worst definition of imagination that I’ve ever seen, but what would you expect from Thomas Hobbes, the guy who is responsible for the worst translation of the Iliad of all time?

Starting this right after Zhuāngzǐ and WOW the Mahāyāna Buddhist vibes are SO DIFFERENT from the Daoist world I was in for a year...

I’m back in this book. It is so wild to read Chinese nationalists in the early 20th century advocating for western Aristotelian rationality because they felt that their own Chinese traditions lacked the philosophical rigor of the West. But, like, I just read Zhuangzi and it was amazing??

the opening track off of the new Mavis Staples album is an absolute BANGER

I finished Zhuāngzǐ! Easily one of top ten best books I've ever read!!

Starting this tonight

One of the best things about homeschooling is intentionally leaving piles of books around for kids to find and read on their own.

I read the Daoism in Zhuangzi and think, "This sounds wonderful!" But then I remember the scathing Buddhist critique in Journey to the West of what Daoism looked like in practice and I am re-chastened.

Very sad day for me today

When my kids graduate from high school I am going to: 1. Try out for local Shakespeare productions 2. Build a home theater and start a local movie watching group for historical and foreign films 3. Start reading groups for adults for books like Dante and Zhuangzi

Fascinating contrast between two back-to-back books of Zhuāngzǐ. In the first, an evil warlord absolutely ridicules Confucius and exposes him to be a greedy fraud. In the very next book, Zhuāngzǐ confronts another evil warlord, tells him a parable of sorts, and "defeats" him.

The Halloween hangover is real. This morning, the eight-year-old said, “Man, those Sour Patch Kids really knocked me down.”

I was recently at a Halloween party where some Gen Z kids were talking about how everyone is either into Star Wars *or* Marvel. The point was that you can't be into both. At which point a Gen X person spoke up and declared, "Well I'm neither. I am into JANE AUSTEN."

The way in which Zhuāngzǐ uses Confucian characters, values, and ideas is unlike anything I've ever read before. It's varied, given Zhuāngzǐ's plural authorship, but even within that variety, the tonal ambiguity between polemic and indebtedness is really striking.

Just found out that Adele Berlin has a brand new commentary on Song of Songs!? Love her work!! Anyone have a spare $100

"Don't you know about the praying mantis? It angrily raises its arms to block the path of an oncoming carriage, unaware it's not up to the task. This is because it has too high an opinion of its capacities." —Zhuāngzǐ 4.3

Do you take the phrase "there was no king in Israel" in the Book of Judges to be a merely descriptive phrase, or is it loaded with the same condemning acid as the corresponding phrase "everyone did what was right in his own eyes"?

What if, in the context of the story, Hannah's song is about a king because she mistakenly believes that /her/ son Samuel will one day become king?

"The story is told of a peasant who, when he heard this consolation from his pastor, that the afflictions and troubles by which God afflicts us are signs of his love, replied: 'Ah, how I would like him to love others and not me!'" —Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis

Let's hear it for Fructuosus of Braga, this random guy who showed up in the Ancient Christian Commentary this morning. Literally have never ever heard of this guy

oh wow Augustine in City of God just straight up calls Hannah a prophet.

Something literarily weird about the Book of Samuel is its ambiguous protagonist. Who, exactly, is the main character of the book?

Even setting aside historical-critical stuff, the Song of Hannah is very weird in narrative context. Why does the mother of the prophet sing a song about a king, especially considering how much the prophet and king will stand in tension throughout the rest of the book?

The realism of the Book of Samuel will never cease to amaze me. The sons of Eli the priest, the sons of Samuel the prophet, and the sons of David the king are all almost journalistically exposed for their bad behavior and rampant corruption.

There is an incredible amount of narrative tension at the beginning of the Book of Samuel between the office of prophet and the priestly establishment. And looming behind this conflict is the dark void where a king could hypothetically be.

you shall not boil a calf in its mother's milk you shall not pour oat milk over your oatmeal

the "dead internet theory" implies the existence of the "resurrected internet theory"

I think it's time to introduce the kids in creative writing club to my boy Gerard Manley Hopkins

心有天遊 "The heart has its heavenly wanderings." —Zhuāngzǐ 26.9 (Fraser trans.)

Another Saturday morning reading Zhuāngzǐ, another morning convinced that this is one of the best books I've ever read

Some of these high school students have gotten so into this literature class that if they miss a week because they're sick, they send their notes along with a friend just to make it clear which side of the debate they are on. 😆

One of those idyllic homeschooling mornings where one teen is assistant teaching a ballet class, one teen is doing math problems, one kid is reading poetry aloud (to himself), and another kid is quietly building lego models.

Whoa! I just realized that the cultural divide on the shield of Aeneas in Aeneid Book 8—West vs. East, centralizing Rome vs. dispersed Greece—was still sort of in play a thousand years later during the East-West Schism of the Christian church in 1054!!

Does the Apostle Paul have an instrumental view of friendship, in that he is only friends with people who are "on his mission" in some way? It seems from his letters that he struggles with being friends with people simply for who they are.