Nora Gallagher. Lovely, spectacular, inspiring book. Gallagher seems to have a gift for observing and staying with what’s real. I picked it up because of a passage I noticed about her lack of a bachelor’s degree and the difficulty that was creating in her application to the Episcopal priesthood. But there’s so much more here. I loaned it out as soon as I had finished it.
Blog
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X2
I admit it pales in direct comparison to Matrix: Reloaded, but it was still a fun evening to fill out a movie day. It’s a shame Jean Gray isn’t a more compelling character; I found I didn’t care about her all that much when she died. (Or did she?)
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Matrix: Reloaded
Of course it’s not as original as the first one–that’s a truism. But it is a fun movie. I admit, in some of the fight and chase scenes I was wondering not about the characters but about the filmmakers, but even so. A big two-thumbs-up.
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Another grey Saturday
Washing, cleaning, unpacking–and trying new Mac things. I’m listening to Nessun Dorma from the album “Puccini Arias” by José Cura.
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Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, 1720–1920
Emma Lapsansky and Anne Verplanck, eds. A collection of mostly very good chapters taking up various aspects of the topic. A few are so academic or arcane as to be confusing, and a couple come close to slight. I did find one howler–a reference to a family claiming descent from George Fox!
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The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics
The Bloody Crossroads of Grammar and Politics is another find from CE‑L.
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A Mighty Wind
Worst movie I’ve seen since Nijinsky. It simply wasn’t funny, and several characters were unpleasant or disturbing for no good reason.
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Mostly, We Eat
Mostly, We Eat is a book group website that I found on the Boston Athenaeum website, of all places. It looks like a great site.
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Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God
By Jack Miles. Just as good as God: A biography. Even the epilogue and the appendices, on his process and the field of literary criticism of the Christian Bible itself, are good reading.
Repentance in the Greek of the Gospels is metanoia, a changing of the mind. The changing of the mind of God is the great subject, the epic argument, of the Christian Bible. Having blighted his own work and cursed his own image with misery and mortality, God faced an immense challenge. He had to restore his masterpiece. He had to redeem those whom he himself had exiled from paradise. For his own sake and not just for theirs, he had to recover the lost crown of his creation.