Actually this pleases me…

I have filed the pic here instead of using their code, by the way, to avoid the dodgy ad that accompanies this. I am sure WordPress would not approve. Neither do I… I take much comfort in the fact John Baker’s blog gets the same rating. So do Eteraz and Man of Lettuce, while Yawning Bread scores “Junior High” and Courting Destiny is “Elementary School”! All these are blogs whose styles I admire.

The literary genre of Acts. 1: Ancient Prologues

While this is on a “rationalist” blog, it is also excellent Biblical scholarship which fundamentalists really need to take seriously — indeed anyone interested in history or theology.

Welcome to our nightmare

 Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital (Australia May 2007; USA Canada October 2007):  

I’ve always been intensely interested in examining ordinary human beings, people without political agendas, who are suddenly caught up in the fist of history and crisis. If someone happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, what happens to their lives from that point onwards? How do they negotiate life, history, politics thereafter?

I suppose I can trace the birth of this intense interest to something that happened to me when we were living in a village in South India in 1977. I was with my two young children in an exceedingly ramshackle taxi heading from the village to the city market in Trivandrum. It was a time of political upheaval in India. Riots broke out, and suddenly our taxi was surrounded by a mob waving the banners of the Communist Party of South India. The taxi could not move forward. Our taxi driver was very frightened and was trembling violently. The rioters were drumming on the taxi roof and windows. The children and I were in the back seat and I felt that weird and absolute calm which is actually shock. I had an arm around each child and can still vividly remember the two dominant thoughts in my head: 1) I must make the children feel safe with me and 2) No one will ever know what happened to us. In fact, the tense situation only lasted a few minutes and then the crowd let the taxi move slowly forward. Since then, I’ve been aware of how suddenly and how randomly political events of which one is only dimly aware can disrupt a life.

This has to be in my top three best reads of 2007!