I love technology… when it helps me. I do not love tech for tech’s sake. So when things go wrong, I get really stressed out. I have a new computer, the old was running slower and slower and was awfully heavy to tote. But switching to the new required hours and hours under Best Buy’s …
What a great event — the 2nd annual B.I.O. conference in DC last Saturday! Thanks to Charles Shields for introducing me to the organization and to him, James McGrath Morris, Barbara Burkhardt, and many others for putting together such a bang-up event. Only a couple hundred attendees, so it felt both intimate and professional. Lively reception Friday …
I participated in my first “crop mob” yesterday at Bellair Farms (CSA). If you’re already lost — what’s a “crop mob” and what is “CSA”? — you’re not alone. Both are pretty new ideas out of the old world of agri-culture, sustainable and sweet. First, CSA: It stands for “community supported agriculture” and is a way …
While the rest of us are schizophrenically both celebrating the wonderful run of our VCU’s Rams basketball making it to the Final Four and bemoaning the out-sized emphasis higher education places on its sports, my colleague Cliff Edwards finds the sweet spot that lets us have it all. “The power of the imagination is the very stuff of …
I finally broke down and went all junior-high with my research — different colored pens for the different accounts of Cyrus’ taking Babylon. The most ancient records are notoriously problematic. Each one has a either a bone to pick or a bridge to sell, and they simply don’t agree on the facts. Did or did …
“The language of God,” Biblical Hebrew. I’m off soon to teach our third week’s class, and we’re in the thick of it now. The alphabet (or aleph-bet) is kind of fun — little ditties, the novelty of recognizing letters completely different from what we see in English, of reading from right to left. But the …
The Particular Exasperations of Learning Biblical Hebrew Read More »
Stephen Dunn, poet extraordinaire. Among my favorites, a riff on the Leviticus scapegoat. It’s a prose poem in which God sympathizes with the goat and calls this method of atonement yet another human sin. I’d love to write it out for you here but haven’t asked permission. Do check it out yourself (I bought What Goes On, …
Now that I’m again safely ensconsed in my office and seated at my desk, the golden retriever’s work of exuberant greeting and following from room to room is done. So he’s sleeping soundly on the floor behind me. The pound hound, a guy who prefers the outdoors even though (short-haired and prone to shivering) he has to wear …
