We mourn with many the passing of Queen Elizabeth II, and pray King Charles continues the established line of his mother.
Elizabeth II’s job as queen was imposed on her by an ancient constitution that required no qualification other than that she exist.
Having been appointed, and whatever her private thoughts, she performed her role over an extraordinarily long reign in near-faultless manner, leaving scant ammunition for personal attack from the fiercest opponents of hereditary principle.
As Britain hurtled through times of astonishing societal change, she faced many challenges in keeping the monarchy apace – and yet she succeeded in remaining a force for national cohesion. A constant: familiar in brightly coloured coat, brimmed hat and handbag, she glad-handed her way through “walkabouts”, garden parties, ship launches, plaque unveilings, tree plantings, building inaugurations – the bread and butter of her engagements diary – with an inscrutable smile in place.
Becoming queen at such a young age meant the world knew little of her personality and views before her accession, and she continued to reveal little thereafter. She never uttered a controversial opinion in public, though supporters and critics would differ over whether this was simply because she held none, or whether she was a master of the art of political neutrality.
When caught in a maelstrom, it was most likely she had been thrust there by a lack of precedent in the protocol on which her life was solidly predicated, or wrong-footed by politicians or the antics of the younger royals.
She once said: “Of course, in this existence, the job and the life go together – you can’t really divide it up.” To some extent the person and position were one and the same. Yet not entirely. She kept much back. Only those closest knew Elizabeth the wife, mother, grandmother and excellent mimic. Though the masses caught occasional glimpses of the private woman, she remained largely an enigma, and will do so until the diaries, which in royal tradition she wrote daily, are made public.
One of the most astounding promises in a Book full of astounding promises is the Lord Jesus Christ’s promise to attend any gathering of even two or three who seek to honour him (Matthew 18:20). Yesterday, he clearly showed up in our little gathering at St. George’s Anglican Church, Moncton, New Brunswick.
In fact, he showed up twice.
Baseball changes, including clamping down on the game-altering shift:
NEW YORK – Players and fans will be dealing with a few new rules in Major League Baseball games during the 2023 season.
The league announced three major rule changes that will be coming for next season that were approved by a majority vote of MLB’s competition committee on Friday.
These new rule changes are:
Pitch Clock
The league will now time pitchers on the mound, requiring that they start the throwing motion to the plate within 15 seconds of each pitch when the bases are empty and 20 seconds when there are runners on-base. A pitcher can disengage with the rubber twice during an at-bat, and if a hurler does more than that, it will result in a balk. Hitters have to be in the batter’s box within eight seconds of the start of the clock and are allowed one timeout per at-bat.
Shift Ban
Two infielders must be on each side of second base when a pitch is thrown and each infielder must have both feet on the outer boundary of the infield when the pitcher is on the rubber. Also, infielders can’t switch sides unless there is a substitution.
Bigger Bases
Starting in 2023, the size of first, second, and third base will increase from 15 inches to 18 inches in what the league says is a move for player safety.
It keeps cropping up in my classes. Perhaps we’re studying about reported Aztec visions of the arrival of “white men” in the Western Hemisphere. “Do you think this really happened, Professor Diller?” someone is bound to ask. And then we stop to have the conversation about miracles—a conversation it seems I have almost every semester in all my courses. Just this week, in my class on the Mediterranean world 600-1600, a student wanted to know if I thought Muhammad was lying about hearing the voice of God, or if he was just delusional.
Historians of the pre-modern world are deeply aware that one of the largest challenges our students face is trying to understand the sacred and profane in the past. In the modern world, we have very few communal sacred spaces, items, or practices. Even those of us in a Christian community often practice a kind of “low church” liturgy that is casual and accessible. It is very challenging for me and my students to read at face value the claims of folks in the past, who said they felt compelled to do something because of the demands of the divine or because of the omens they saw. Smart young people assume everyone in the past is being motivated by power or money, not by sincere belief.
So that’s two problems for the history teacher connected to the supernatural: Both the fact that moderns don’t take it seriously, and that students are tempted to try to prove whether a magical experience did or didn’t happen that way. The first one I will try to address in the classroom. I want my students to imagine a world in which the magical, miraculous, and sacred/evil are abroad everywhere in the world. That’s the context of the people they are studying. This requires them to try to “un-know” things like what causes an eclipse or how mass psychosis works. We need them to come face to face with the world they are studying.
Questions, questions, questions — about that recent ancient papyrus find: (earlier story found here):
According to the press reports, this papyrus was radiometrically dated by the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot to First Temple Period, apparently the late First Temple Period (i.e., late 7th or early 6th century BCE). The press reports seem to suggest that this radiometric dating confirms the antiquity of the inscription itself. However, I would emphasize that the antiquity of the medium of an inscription certainly does not demonstrate that the inscription itself is ancient. After all, ancient potsherds, ancient leather, and ancient papyrus (the last of which is the most relevant in this case) are all available, either on ancient tels (in the case of potsherds) or on the antiquities market (in the case of leather and papyrus). Modern forgers can, have, and still do, use such ancient media to produce forgeries in the modern period (and forged inscriptions have been a constant, for several millennia, believe it or not). I emphasized this point (i.e., that ancient media could be used for modern forgeries) ca. twenty years ago in the academic journal MAARAV (Rollston, “Non-Provenanced Epigraphs I: Pillaged Antiquities, Northwest Semitic Forgeries, and Protocols for Laboratory Tests.” MAARAV 10 (2003): 135-193), and I discussed it in even more detail in a fairly recent article (“The Putative Authenticity of the New ‘Jerusalem’ Papyrus Inscription: Methodological Caution as a Desideratum,” Pp. 321-330 in Rethinking Israel: Studies in the History and Archaeology of Ancient Israel in Honor of Israel Finkelstein, ed. Oded Lipschits. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2017). In this connection, it should be emphasized that the Museum of the Bible Forged Scrolls were forged in the modern period but the modern forger used ancient leather (since that forger was fairly good at deception, knew how to cover his tracks, to some degree). Similarly, the Jesus Wife Papyrus was forged in the modern period, but on ancient papyrus (again, that forger was fairly decent at deception, knew what to do to dupe people, including some scholars). In short, an ancient carbon date for the medium (papyrus, potsherd, leather) certainly does not demonstrate, in and of itself, the antiquity of an inscription.
CHICAGO — Coffee and bicycles are parked as a pair at Heritage General Store, a unique shop that fills the first floor of a turn-of-the-century building on Lincoln Ave. in Chicago’s Lake View neighborhood.
“The cultures of coffee and bikes overlap so much,” said Michael Salvatore, the owner of Heritage. “The cyclists love coffee. It’s crazy, it’s a natural fit.”
Salvatore is a fifth generation Chicagoan, who was raised in the city and attended Loyola Academy in Wilmette.
In 2007, he moved to New York to become a trader, but left the financial industry after the crash in 2008. He decided to pursue his passion: building bicycles. While working in Queens, and selling bikes at street fairs, he found that shoppers were more at ease — and willing to chat — with a cup of coffee.
“I was blown away at how easy it was to approach people who had a coffee in hand, or a muffin, or a drink, I was like one day when I want to do this concept, I want to pair that – do the two together,” Salvatore said.
A more than two-mile stretch of road in southern Illinois will be closed for several weeks due to a yearly snake migration that is not often seen anywhere else in the country.
Known as "snake road," Forest Road #345 in the Shawnee National Forest was closed to vehicles starting Sept. 1 and continuing through Oct. 30, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
The road is shut down to vehicles twice a year, with another closure taking place from March to May.
The Illinois Department of Natural Resources says the twice-yearly event marks a time when snakes migrate to and from nearby limestone bluffs and the LaRue Swamp. IDNR notes that some of the snakes and amphibians making the trek from cliffs to water and back are endangered in Illinois and in the U.S., so the road closures help ensure their safety as they cross.
It's a rare and shockingly popular sight in southern Illinois, but while the road is closed to vehicles, it's not closed to people.
The forest service stresses to onlookers that "capturing, collecting or harassing wildlife of any kind is prohibited."
The joy of meandering! To the extent of looking at the winding roads of significant things through life/history. As I sit on the back patio, with our dog, we see a changing jet trail that either began or ended at the Columbus airport. Where is it coming from, or going to? Who might be on it? To my right, through a 20 foot band of trees lies the bed of an inter urban railroad’s tracks that operated regularly around a hundred years ago. And, there’s the home I live in, and the land it sits on.
The house was built by a high school shop teacher. He’s no longer around to tell about it. Over the last 30-40 years, it has housed United Methodist pastors and their families, those who had them. Ten years from now, My wife and I could be known as the last United Methodist pastoral family to live in this home, on this property. This, because of current change in the “Methodist movement” a over sexual, gender, and marriage identity!
Whether we’re considering papyrus or snake trails or my literal view at the moment, the sacredness of our meanderings are a mix of our subjectivity and objectivity, and where that influences the trails we find ourselves on tomorrow, doesn’t? And that reaches into the lives we encounter along our travels! If I believe there is sacred in it all, it blazes one meandering trail. If I don’t believe it’s all sacred, does it stop when I push “Post”?
(In the meantime, the jet trail has crossed paths with another to form a very large cross, which then morphed into a snake shaped cloud, with a fresh jet trail cutting across the sky above it! Thanks be to God for blessing our imaginations!