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Tyrian Purple

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Thou shalt make also a veil of violet and purple, and scarlet twice dyed, and fine twisted linen, wrought with embroidered work, and goodly variety:  And thou shalt hang it up before four pillars of setim wood, which themselves also shall be overlaid with gold, and shall have heads of gold, but sockets of silver. And the veils shall be hanged on with rings, and within it thou shalt put the ark of the testimony, and the sanctuary, and the holy of holies shall be divided with it. —The Book of Exodus 26:31-33 The foundations thereof are in the holy mountains: The Lord loveth the gates of Sion above all the tabernacles of Jacob. Glorious things are said of thee, O city of God. I will be mindful of Rahab and of Babylon knowing me. Behold the foreigners, and Tyre, and the people of the Ethiopians, these were there. Shall not Sion say, This  man and that  man is born in her? and the Highest himself hath founded her. The Lord shall tell in his  writings of peoples and of princes, of them that
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The Sacredest Place

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 I am fascinated by the dialogue captured in this video. The clip is an excerpt from a longer video recorded by  New Yorker  correspondent  Luke Mogelson  on January 6, 2021, when Jake Angeli, alias Jacob Chansley, alias the Q Shaman, entered  the Senate Chamber  along with other Trump supporters and occupied the Vice President’s desk.* The above segment comes about halfway through the YouTube video ( timestamp 6:18 ). The camera catches Angeli walking through the door, followed by an officer:** Angeli : Hey! Fuckin’ A, man! Glad to see you guys. You guys are fuckin’ patriots. Look at this guy. He’s got, covered in blood, God bless you.  Officer [ addressing the man seated on the floor in front of the desk ]: You good, sir? Do you need medical attention? Man in red hat : I’m good, thank you.  Officer : All right.  Man in red hat [ on phone ]: I got shot in the face. I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet.  Officer : Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senat
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Battery Life

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“Isn’t it better to be open to other people’s points of view?” —HSBC Ad campaign, A.D. 2008 What do you see when you look at these two images? A patriot? A traitor? Which one is which? Have you had arguments with friends or family members the past ten days since these images hit our social media accounts? Have you lost friends over which label you put on which image?  I thought so.  After all, we’ve been here before.  Do you remember how angry everyone got over Trump vs. Hillary ? I know, it seems a lifetime ago. How about Romney vs. Obama ? That was so far back in the Dark Ages of this blog I couldn’t even remember the title I gave to the post, I just remembered I did the label thing. (I found the post by searching for “My guy.” I remembered the photo captions.) “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s  the ugliest of them all ?” Isn’t it remarkable how I can write basically the exact same post about how our biases affect the way we see the main characters in our national play  every time w
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A Poetry Class for the End of the World

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  Milo and the Professor are back with a special episode of Friday Night’s All Right,  available on Censored.tv ! With protestors storming the Capitol Building and tempers running high, what better poem to capture the Spiritus Mundi  than “ The Second Coming ” by William Butler Yeats?  Turning and turning in the widening gyre    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst    Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it    Reel shadows of the
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Mirror Year

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I am tired, I am weary I could sleep for a thousand years A thousand dreams that would awake me Different colors made of tears This is the year that we launched my book about Milo . This is also the year that Milo kicked me ( more than once ) out of his Telegram chat.* This is the year that my stepfather died (December 10, may he rest in peace and rise in glory). This is also the year that I got to spend six weeks living with my mother and brother, taking walks around her neighborhood and staying up late into the night talking about meaning and patterns with my irl bro.  This is the year that my dog Joy died . This is also the year that I got to spend every day for the eight months before she died playing with her for hours out in our backyard since I was not having to go into campus during that time. This is the year that my teaching in Spring got thrown onto Zoom . This is also the year that I launched my own series of videos about Tolkien on Unauthorized.tv . This is the year that
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Signs of Joy

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When the fullness of time came God sent his Son, his eternal wisdom, the substance of his own glory, into this world, who took the nature of humanity from the substance of a woman, a virgin, by means of the Holy Ghost. And so was born the “just seed of David,” the “Angel of the great counsel of God,” the very Messiah promised, whom we confess and acknowledge to be Emmanuel, true God and true man, two perfect natures united and joined in one person.  —The Scots Confession (1560), chapter VI  Thus saith the Lord: Heaven is my throne, and the earth my footstool: what is this house that you will build to me? and what is this place of my rest? 2 My hand made all these things, and all these things were made, saith the Lord. But to whom shall I have respect, but to him that is poor and little, and of a contrite spirit, and that trembleth at my words? 3 He that sacrificeth an ox, is as if he slew a man: he that killeth a sheep in sacrifice, as if he should brain a dog: he that offereth an obl
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Alt History of the World Fairs

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Almost every day that I allow myself online (a.k.a. daily), I end up in an argument about my credibility as a historian. As Owen’s alter ego Ira might put it (with appropriate snark), “How dare you claim to be a historian when you believe [fill in the blank some detail about whatever topic is under discussion]?”* Well, quite possibly because as a historian, I am used to having to revise my understand of “what actually happened” based on re-evaluation of what we accept as historical sources.  For example, Bede’s history of the English church. You have all heard of Bede, right ? “The Venemous Bede” as 1066 and All That put it. Bede is one of our most important historians for the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, intimately interested (you might say) in the mission of Augustine to Canterbury and the subsequent conversion of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes to Christ. Bede had at his disposal a great library (for the early eighth century) which the founding abbot of his monast
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