I am hearing that on his deathbed Lindsay Graham received the light of Islam and unhesitatingly recited the Shahada. Even now he looks down on the Ummah from the gardens of Jannah. Truly there is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is his prophet!

Congratulations to the Society of St Pious X for their victory over GAFCON in the "who will go full schismatic first" bracket

you know what's crazy with how education is headed I can see the emergence of a market at some time in the future consisting of students paying overqualified and underemployed graduates to mark their essays because they want genuine feedback from a real person and their fees don't buy that anymore

broke: this woke: wondering how much would have been achieved sooner if the Mongols hadn't ended the Islamicate Golden Age, and how different things would look if that trajectory had continued

I'm gei (gay but also kind of rei)?

Little owl (Athene noctua) The grumpiest looking owl in the uk #birdsofbluesky #wildlife #nature #birdphotography #birding #owls #littleowls

IF THE KNICKS CAN WIN THEN SO CAN COMMUNISM

I actually kind of want to write this paper Clines is equal parts unbelievably perceptive and frustratingly myopic (the partner essay to this is pretty egregious in places, but to the point of being boring)

Without downloading new pics, what is it like to date or be married to you? (Yes, this is just a random page from Clines' DCH)

Entry: שִׁבֹּ֫לֶת n.f. ear of grain

A proposal for a paper entirely via the title: "why is There a 'Why is There a Book of Job and What Does it do to You When You Read it?' and What Does it do to You When You Read it?"

Red morph eastern screech owl from yesterday #birding #owl #screechowl

at risk of being a boring ass by joining the pile on I think there are two very important things being missed in everyone's responses to this, the first being very basic: if this were true how would we know this? At the very least there would be documents from command saying something like this.

very tempted to quote anyone citing that bit in Galatians in support of James Talarico with the rejoinder that actually the rest of the letter relies on the reality of the insitution of slavery for the whole bit about those who are in slavery and those who are free and inheritance...

Living in New Zealand is a non-stop thrill-ride.

I now have all of Milgrom on Leviticus and no vols match each other The cost one pays for bargain hunting

since there's discourse on bluesky culture vs twitter culture again, I just wanna say that on bluesky I haven't had a bunch of people I was friends with turn on me and call me a "metaphysical zionist" for pointing out that the theological concepts a philosopher was invoking against...

it's cool how bluesky has now (at least for the first time I've noticed) matured enough that the "mistaking a descriptive statement for a prescriptive one" thing is endemic this platform might develop into twitter yet at this rate

when I was in my late teens/early 20s everyone was reading Nietzsche and Foucault and pretending to read Deleuze and Guattari Kohelet is once again proven entirely correct

this guy just threw all this gold into the fire and the statue just fell out by itself, honest

right I'm gonna try and crowdsource something on this platform for the first time: what are some examples of conservative Christians painting their opponents as Marcionites or Gnostics who reject the "Old Testament"?

right I'm gonna try and crowdsource something on this platform for the first time: what are some examples of conservative Christians painting their opponents as Marcionites or Gnostics who reject the "Old Testament"?

Hello from my new house G-d is good

Pulling a Walter Benjamin and unpacking my library (I finally have a flat of my own)

an extremely niche bookshop selling mostly stuff that interests me and making most of its money through selling history books and antiquarian religious volumes

לב אנוש ישנא פניו אם לטוב ואם לרע Beentjes ed. of the Hebrew MSS of Ben Sira, Brill, 1997 This is MS A, V, v, 19 (13:25) "The heart of a man changes his countenance either for good or for evil" is how I would render this modifying the NRSVue which depersonalizes it

the whole UFO thing was started as a counter-intelligence operation to obscure US R&D/defense stuff during the cold war and they lost control of it, meaning a non-negligible chunk of the conspiracism about the government in that movement is reading actual events through a heavily distorted lens

I can't go back there Not back to the park The brown monk ghost will catch us And make us lust-rockers Make us wear huckleberry masks

מה בשר לאלה ומה יחשב עפר ואפר לספר אלה מקץ לקץ ולהתיצב במעמד לפניכה לבוא ביחד עם בני שמים ואין מליץ להשיב דבר כפיכה

For the people who think that Vance might have a point in his rejoinder to the Pope on purely historical grounds, I think it's important to couch this in context in order to understand what both parties to the dispute are actually saying in order to understand what's going on -

We need journalists who will ask Vance if he has spoken to his bishop about these issues, and if he has discussed whether his comportment is in accordance with the teachings of the Church as made manifest in the Magisterium

I'm late to the party but, while we're at it: the Aga Khan has no plan to tackle inflation

a belated poem for Pesach George Oppen - Exodus www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57148/...

Entry: [רָחַם] vb. denom. love. Pi. have compassion Qal I love thee Pi. have compassion, compassionate Pu. be shewn compassion, compassionated

The Bible has changed significantly over time, and we have concrete records of many of those changes - they're not hypothetical. And that we have records of those changes means that they were after at the earliest after c250BCE, so those changes are, compared to the scope of the bible, recent

Ok, callout post for the tiktok bible guy @maklelan.bsky.social I jest, but I think this deals with some pretty important issues, that I've spent a chunk of the past two years studying thanks to @haydentank.bsky.social for feedback on drafts of this simonereadstexts.substack.com/p/rememberin...

Ok, callout post for the tiktok bible guy @maklelan.bsky.social I jest, but I think this deals with some pretty important issues, that I've spent a chunk of the past two years studying thanks to @haydentank.bsky.social for feedback on drafts of this simonereadstexts.substack.com/p/rememberin...

I know a Joke about Rashi on Ex. 18:13, but I can't tell it now, because the timing isn't right

post three good things, none of which are the cessation of a negative 1) Torah 2) Nevi'im 3) The Aramaic Levi Document

this is, I think, illustrative of the amateurism of Jesus mythicism: look at the equivocation - there is "no record" turns, in the next sentence to "the record is unreliable". Both of these things cannot be true, and no actual historian would equivocate like this.

it feels morally important that, in the midst of all this death by Aramaic flashcards gave me this this morning: וַאֲמַר מֶה עֲבַדְתָּא קַל דַם זַרְעִין דִעֲתִידִין לְמֵפַק מִן אָחוּךְ קַבְלִין קֳדָמַי מִן אַרְעָא:

I think there's something important missing here which is that, while Tanakh is replete with slave language (including the language of "redemption" which is the restoration of Israel to their rightful place as slaves of G-d, this doesn't substantially change in the NT, but rather warps....

reminds me of this, from Simone Weil, an ethnically Jewish Woman (despite her complicated religion) writing to a Catholic priest in occupied Marseilles in 1942

Poem from a funeral today: Return This heap of words Ashen-haired Erupt On pages onward Where this black comes from Does it ward Some Thing To Ward time Tenant of the impeccable Yes, fifty odd books pile on each other Ply weave O cesurae return -ing

Poem from a funeral today: Return This heap of words Ashen-haired Erupt On pages onward Where this black comes from Does it ward Some Thing To Ward time Tenant of the impeccable Yes, fifty odd books pile on each other Ply weave O cesurae return -ing

reminds me of this, from Simone Weil, an ethnically Jewish Woman (despite her complicated religion) writing to a Catholic priest in occupied Marseilles in 1942

aside from everything else saying this in a country whose population was nearly halved during the 30 years war following the reformation is a decision, and tells you a lot about how genuine these people's appeals to history are their fight is for an phantasm, though we already knew that

I've read nearly all of this in the past week and boy is this rough going (open access) muse.jhu.edu/book/75386

it is pride month here now, so, in the spirit of the season:

Vish is good people, if you're able to help please do 👇