Fencing Bear at Prayer

Who knew?  Elms really do support vines ; indeed, it is an ancient metaphor for the union between husband (elm) and wife (vine).  I'm going to pay better attention to the literal sense of what John is saying from now on.

I'm feeling a bit better now, but I'm still having trouble focusing on the primary sources I was supposed to be reading this week, so this morning I spent some time reading a few articles on titles of the Virgin Mary and their interpretation. Little did I know what I was in for! According to Helen Phillips (Cardiff University*), the titles that I am so fascinated by--and on which the next section of the chapter that I am writing is going to focus--are not (as I had led myself to believe) celebrations of the Virgin's role in the Incarnation stimulated by awe at the paradox that (as Jeremiah 31:22 famously put it) "a woman encompasses a man" (i.e. the God-man Christ) but, rather, purposeful efforts on the part of a misogynistic clergy to deny Mary not only agency, but integrity, fragmenting her as they do into so many inanimate things: mirror of justice, seat of wisdom, spiritual vessel, mystical rose, tower of David, house of gold, ark of the covenant, gate of ...

I really wish my father were here. Then I wouldn't have to depend upon my friends (that's you, M.B.) and anonymous readers (that's you, Sean) to pat me on the head and tell me how naive I am. "Taxes are bad because they take money from the people who have earned it and make it impossible for them to start new businesses, hire workers, and generally benefit the economy all around." My father loved this argument when he was talking about trying to get his auto shop to make some (any) money, but for the last fifteen years of his life, he worked for the surgery department in a public university and spent the greater part of his time at the V.A. hospital, being paid by, um, the government. He was also, in his younger days, adamantly opposed to any government-supported health care system; by the time he died, he had revised his thinking on this somewhat. The bureaucracy, waste and corruption of the insurance system had convinced him that the poor--whom he spent the...