May 2009 Archives

Today is the Christian festival of Pentecost, and I've been working on what looks like it'll be the final chapter in my Bible Babel book. The several different names for God that show up in the Bible -- that's what the chapter's about. Although one could argue whether or not it belongs, I include the Spirit -- Holy Spirit, Spirit of God -- there, and no discussion would be complete without some description of the dramatically in-Spir-ing moment of the first Christian Pentecost, narrated in the New Testament's book of Acts (chapter 2).

That story in Acts is a kind of Babel revisited, to opposite effect.

Hospitality in fierce climes is crucial. The hospitality of the desert is legendary, and several biblical stories hinge on it. Who knows, some suggest, but you might at any time be entertaining angels. Abraham and Sarah made a comfortable place for visitors, undercover messengers of God, who declared that the elderly Sarah will finally have a son. The criminality of Sodom's population is immediately evident to readers simply by their intent to harm the visitors (also angels in human guise) in their midst.

I live in the South, where people pride themselves on gracious hospitality, and it is indeed a lovely tradition, but right now I'm back in northern Minnesota where I great up, right on the tip of Lake Superior.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then what's a picture with words

worth? GQ recently published eleven cover pages from ealier Pentagon

intelligence briefings. That they juxtapose biblical quotations with Iraq

war photos has elicited all sorts of righteous indignation.  Predictably,

many people are outraged that Rumsfeld and Bush would blithely endorse

equating Christian mission with a Mid-East military invasion. Others say,

not so fast. Context, as always, is everything -- the context of the photos,

of America's military today, and of those biblical verses.