I don't know, but . . .

I wonder what they teach reporters to do

University Baptist Church closed last month, and the Good Samaritan House declined the building. The Daily Egyptian's report, despite the headline, is mostly about the future use of the building, and includes several textual curiousities: "The sanctuary was filled with several emotional congregants", and the pastor is called "John Annabelle" while the sign outside says "John Annable."

I wonder where the plaque with the names of the founding members will end up.

When I was there, by and large professors went to UBC and students (or at least the cool kids) went to a different church. I don't know if that was to avoid the appearance of evil, or if mutual forgiveness might be an issue--or if it was just the fashion of the moment.

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"Killer Mane Salon"

No, Medusa is not on their web page.

The sermon today was on Luke 11:1-13, which begins with a shorter version of the Lord's Prayer and ends with "If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?"

One obvious question is "Where in the Lord's Prayer does one ask for the gift of the Holy Spirit?"

I wonder if it comes from basileia: "bas-il-i'-ah; from G935; properly, royalty, i.e. (abstractly) rule, or (concretely) a realm (literally or figuratively):—kingdom, + reign." If the word means kingship, and the invitation is implicitly for that to come beginning with us, then perhaps that part of the request is for God's kingship to be in us. If so, thanks to God's simplicity, that's a request for God to be in us.

Yes, I know Matthew has something a bit different.

One side effect of losing weight thanks to the problems of this past year is that one doesn't have as much personal insulation to face November with.

By Kurp and Samuel Johnson

The kids across the street finally broke their pinata; a good time apparently had by all. One just now gave up on trying to see if he could shake any more candy from the broken green donkey.

But from my PoV, there was a great moment earlier when, after a few hard but ineffective bashes, a wind gust blew through the tree the pinata hung from, and hundreds of small yellow leaves showered everyone.

I was reading Ezekiel 43 this morning ("defile ... by the corpses of their kings") and what leapt to mind was Westminster Abbey. That's probably not a fair comparison, but...

I was chasing rabbits while learning about the Deuterocanonical books, and ran across something I'd not heard of before in the Dead Sea scrolls: most of the scrolls of scripture were "proto-masoretic" but some reflected the Septuagint. There seem to have been several variant textual traditions (not different in substance, but in details -- and generally not major details either), and the Alexandrian scholars seem to have picked one to translate into Greek. A few centuries later Jews converged on the Masoretic text as definitive. (With, germane to my interest here, the Deuterocanonicals omitted as not having been written in Hebrew but Greek. Which, for some of them at least, the Dead Sea scrolls show to be an incorrect assumption.)

Why the change in preferred texts? Some early Christian writers accused the Jews of removing books and concentrating on a variant that provided less support to Christianity. I can imagine them preferring "a young girl shall conceive" over "a virgin shall conceive" for that reason, but I don't see that Tobit is all that supportive of Christianity. In fact I've read that the Orthodox accept the Deuterocanonicals as canonical, but as "second-class" as far as supporting doctrine.

Wikipedia claims that "Very few manuscripts are said to have survived the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE." That's suggestive.

If the scholars in Alexandria decided on the "proto-septuagint" variant manuscripts as being the best, they'd have collected as many as possible to provide the translators with their material. In a land without printing presses, there might not have been a lot of them to begin with -- though synagogues should have had a copy of the Torah, so there should have been a lot of those.

Which manuscript tradition to pick might therefore have been based on geography -- what was available locally. Translators mentioned in the link above were in modern Turkey and Greece, not Egypt. If the Alexandrians snarfed up most of the proto-septuagint types for their translation project, that would leave the rest for everybody else. The Dead Sea scrolls were proto-masoretic over proto-septuagint by 12 to 1. (A looser version made up 20%, and others 15%.)

My own take on the Deuterocanonicals from years ago was that they were mostly harmless, and sometimes wise, though here and there (perhaps translation issues?) were some things that don't fit well with the gospel (a daughter is a loss?).

you don't want to know the answers to. "Liberia's Education Ministry has blocked controversial plans to introduce mandatory drug testing in all of the country's schools."

Liberia has a major problem with drug abuse among youth: UNFPA guessing 1 in 5 (maybe only 1 in 18, but that's still a lot). So, what do you do? Test, maybe?

Setting aside accuracy issues, and ignoring the cost of a testing program, what do they plan to do with the information? What can they do, if they identify someone as a drug abuser? Is what they're doing now working at all?

Someone described an expert as a person who can explain how bad your situation is, but not tell you how to get out of it.

is treated as a cure-all and factotum, embedded in everything and trusted by the best minds. Or at least influential minds. Haven't we seen this movie before?

Creature Feature is out!

The cover images must be for other people's stories. I wrote my story quite a while back--I haven't been able to write very much the last few months. It's encouraging to see this.

"In a crackdown on substandard tertiary institutions, the National Commission on Higher Education (NCHE) has shut down 31 unauthorized colleges and suspended the licenses of 22 others for violating accreditation standards and regulatory requirements."

The list of the shutdown and suspended can be found in a Facebook post. I've never heard of them. A large fraction are religious institutions. I'm not sure what "Divine Airline School & Management Studies" is.

More interesting to me is the list of schools that got the "one-year compliance ultimatum" issued to them. Big names: "University of Liberia, Cuttington University, Bomi County Technical College, Adventist University of West Africa, Salvation Army Polytechnic University, Apex University of Liberia, and Nimba University. The full list is here. I taught the first (and AFAIK only) physics lecture at African Methodist Episcopal University (and exited the building through a mob of students on an unrelated strike), and my father was buried at Liberian Baptist Theological Seminary. The latter is pretty specialized, unlike University of Liberia--which I'm sad but not surprised to see on the list.

In a formal statement, the NCHE cited multiple risk factors threatening the viability of the affected institutions, including: Severe financial instability, declining student enrollment, insufficient qualified academic staff, substandard infrastructure, poor institutional governance and administrative inefficiencies.

That's for the ones they issued the warning to. The others were worse.