Thinking about Bibles in the Holiness churches of my childhood this morning. Thompson Chain Reference was standard issue. Everyone who wanted to study the Bible had one of these. (Needless to say, Holiness churches were KJV-only.) The conceit of the Thompson–and what made it appealing to Holiness folks–was that it was not a study Bible full of “man’s opinions”; it was a study Bible that directed you back to the text itself.
In 1773, Ann Lee and other Shakers were arrested for causing a disturbance during a service at Christ Church in Manchester. Afterwards she was questioned by ministers. Richard Francis, Ann the Word: Once when recounting the tale of this religious interrogation, Ann said she spoke for four hours and the ministers - the ‘greatest in those parts’ (suddenly we hear the illiterate daughter of a blacksmith talking) - ‘said that I spoke in seventy two different tongues, and that I spoke them more perfect than any in their knowledge were able to do.
Remember the reported UFO sightings at Malmstrom Air Force Base and other sites associated with nuclear missiles? One way of understanding that phenomenon is as some kind of manifestation of our collective fear. How long until we start getting UFO sightings at data centers?
I see UFOs are in the news again. I haven’t been paying much attention; I’m waiting for the episodes of Why Files that explains it all. I will only note in passing that I recently heard someone (maybe Neil Degrasse Tyson?) condescendingly point out (it had to to Neil Degrasse Tyson) that UFO sightings only happen in the English-speaking world. Poppycock. They’re described in the English-speaking world as UFOs because that is our cultural language.
Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld … I will be outlining a way of perceiving the world which, while it does not explain the appearance of strange images, renders them intelligible. It is a way which requires, first of all, not that we believe, but that we suspend disbelief, as in the enjoyment of a theatrical production; a way which asks us to foster what Keats called “negative capability–that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Andrew Lang’s introduction to The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies: [The author, Robert Kirk] died (if he did die, which is disputed) in 1692, aged about fifty-one; his tomb was inscribed– ROBERTUS KIRK, A.M. Linguæ Hinberniæ Lumen. The tomb, in Scott’s time, was to be seen in the east end of the churchyard of Aberfoyle; but the ashes of Mr. Kirk are not there. His successor, the Rev.