The Sacramentality of Scripture

Scott Hahn has a nice lecture online at America Magazine and the American Bible Society’s new Bible catechetical website, The Living Word.

This is nice to see, as obviously a Jesuit-connected magazine like America needs to be spreading the Gospel in order to be more like itself, more as it was meant to be.

Anyway, the first few minutes are presenters introducing the website project’s ambitious goals; and then Hahn’s talk on “The Sacramentality of Scripture” starts about 12 minutes into the podcast.

The lecture also announces that Hahn is going to be a visiting professor at Mundelein this year.

Nonus Is Good Nus

My first draft translation of Beatus’ Commentary on the Apocalypse has hit Liber Nonus. (That’s Book Nine to me and you).

US Bank and “Have a Blessed Day”

The Anchoress considers the intersection between Christianity and business courtesy, with reference to the US Bank lawsuit about “Have a blessed day.”

In medieval Ireland, it was an offense punished by a fine if any craftsman or -woman did not pray for a blessing from God for the completed work. The first person who saw the work was also expected to bless it.

(Possibly because it was then suspected that one might have cursed it. Or possibly because a lot of solemn Irish imprecatory cursing happened in the workplace, and one needed to offset that.)

Moving aside the point, it turns out that there’s another brehon law/mystery series out there besides Peter Tremayne’s early early medieval Sister Fidelma; this one is set in the 16th century in the twilight of the Gaelic law system. Mara, Brehon of the Burren stars in a series of over ten books. The first book, My Lady Judge, is $2.99 on the Kindle.

I Was Not Told There Would Be a Test

Our dear St. Beatus of Liebana, who has hitherto been quoting mostly the Fathers and the Scriptures, has apparently decided to branch out more in his reading as he approaches the last fourth of his Commentary on the Apocalypse.

He is throwing in the odd quote from Virgil and Seneca. Quotes that nooooooobody else caught, and which I am only catching because you look at them, and you look where you’ve marked the quotes with colored marker and where the page is unmarked, and you see there are unmarked bits that look like quotes, and you run them through the search engine and they are.

He is also cramming more subtle Bible quotes into his sentences, and the critical editions haven’t been catching that, either.

It is very nifty, but it is also very scary to be the only one noticing this stuff. And what if he’s quoting lost sources? There are some bits that definitely seem like quotes but don’t produce any search results.

On the bright side, computational linguistic analysis of texts is getting more sophisticated.

Sooooo Close to Finishing Book 3 of Beatus

And if it weren’t for all those meddlesome quotes, I’d be done now!

Heh, actually I don’t mind, as finding lost quotes makes me feel useful and clever. Or at least good at bending search engines to my will. 🙂

On the first-pass translation side, I’m up to Book 8. So you can see that editing doesn’t go superspeed around here.

Also, I made a nice pork loin yesterday. I roasted it in my crockpot with Korean bulgogi sauce, and so it is sweet and very spicy! I also made rice to go with it this week, and then used up the extra sauce in the crockpot on some veggies. So I am feeling very efficient!