thanks for not being a zombie

...and I could understand you thinking that way, but hear me out. Rather than search Amazon or go to an actual bookstore, I'm asking you, dear reader, for a recommendation because that's the kind of bond we have, that's how much I trust you and depend upon you. Can you handle that kind of trust? I'm pretty sure you can.

I need a good reading edition of the King James Bible. What I don't like about most editions of the Bible is what I don't like about the Norton Anthology of English Literature: tiny type, tiny margins, and paper that's so thin it's verging on onion skin.

So what do you think? Is there an edition I might get my hands that would not have these reader-unfriendly features?

Posted by at 6:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Posted by at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

From the Book of Common Prayer (1770):

The Order how the Psalter is appointed to be read.

The Psalter shall be read through once every Month, as it is there appointed, both for Morning and Evening Prayer. But in February it shall be read only to the Twenty-eighth, or Twenty-ninth day of the Month

And whereas January, March, May, July, August, October and December, have One-and-thirty days apiece; it is ordered, that the same Psalms shall be read the last day of the said Months, which were read the day before: So that the Psalter may begin again the first day of the next month ensuing.

And whereas the 119 Psalm is divided into 22 Portions, and is overlong to be read at one time; it is so ordered, that at one time shall not be read above four or five of the said Portions.

And at the end of every Psalm, and of every such part of the 119 Psalm, shall be repeated this Hymn,

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son: and to the Holy Ghost;
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be: world without end. Amen

Note, That the Psalter followeth the Division of the Hebrews, and the Translation of the great English Bible, set forth and used in the time of King Henry VIII. and Edward VI.

Posted by at 3:13 PM | Permalink

One of my correspondents weighs in with these two observations:

Nothing earth shaking on Psalms, but I did wonder when I saw the post if the question isn't 'why are the Psalms the subject of sermons so often' as 'why are the Psalms read so much more often than the other books of the Bible?' In the lectionary cycle, they are second only to the gospels in frequency of reading. Since you generally have to at least pretend to be talking about the readings, the Psalms are a frequent option.

and

It occurs to me this morning that this is really a problem of canon formation and perpetuation. Why were the psalms so prominent when Wesley received the canon and why did he respond to them so strongly in his own work?

[See previous entries: Psalms, Comment on Psalms, More on Psalms Later, and Wesley on Psalms]

Posted by at 7:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Here is what John Wesley says about the Psalms in his Explanatory Notes Upon the Old Testament (any typos are mine):

We have now before us one of the choicest parts of the Old Testament, wherein there is so much of Christ and his gospel, as well as of God and his law, that it has been called the summary of both Testaments. The history of Israel; which we were long upon, instructed us in the knowledge of God. The book of Job gave us profitable disputations, concerning God and his providence. But this book brings us into the sanctuary, draws us off from converse with men, with the philosophers or disputers of this world, and directs us into communion with God.

It is called, the Psalms, in Hebrew Tehillim, which properly signifies Psalms of praise, because many of them are such; but Psalms is a more general word, meaning all poetical compositions, fitted to be sung. St. Peter stiles it, The book of Psalms. It is a collection of psalms, of all the Psalms that were divinely inspired, composed at several times, on several occasions, and here put together, without any dependence on each other. Thus they were preserved from being scattered and lost, and kept in readiness for the service of the church. One of these is expressly said to be the prayer of Moses. That some of them were penned by Asaph, is intimated, 2 Chron. xxix. 30. where they are said to praise the Lord, in the words of David and Asaph, who is there called a seer or prophet. And some of the Psalms seem to have been penned long after, at the time of the captivity in Babylon. But the far greater part were wrote by David, who was raised up for establishing the ordinance of singing Psalms in the church of God, as Moses and Aaron were for settling the ordinance of / sacrifice. Theirs indeed is superseded, but this will remain, till it be swallowed up in the songs of eternity.

There is little in the book of Psalms of the ceremonial law. But the moral law is all along magnitude and made honourable. And Christ the foundation corner and top-stone of all religion, is here clearly spoken of; both his sufferings, with the glory that should follow, and the kingdom he should set up in the world.

Posted by at 3:34 AM | Permalink

Thanks for the feedback on the Book of Psalms, y'all. I need to think and do a bit more research. One thing I'm going to do is look at what John Wesley has to say in his Notes on the Old Testament.

Blogging on this topic will occur at a later, as yet unspecified time.

That is all.

Posted by at 3:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Comments on Wordherders now work again. Please let me know if you run into any problems.

Before comments started working again, Meg emailed me this:

Yeah, I felt your burning eyes upon me, from 9000km away.

What Now can testify to the ability of the Psalms to scratch the vengeance itch. But before I share my views, let the record show that she believes in God and I don't -- I just believe in the Bible (as an amazing collection of writing).

I see the Psalms as primarily offering comfort for bad things happening. There's no narrative to speak of, few of the philosophical themes that form the infrastructure of the Bible, just an extended "Dang, this sucks" followed by "But just you wait, 'enry 'iggins, just you wait."

As such, they are perfect for sermons, particularly to the Ordinary Folk. After all, whose lives suck most, and who most needs religion to console them (and/or to keep them from revolting against the suckitude)?

Aside from Revelations, the rest of the Bible follows complex, reverberative themes. Themes lead to thought, and thought leads to interpretation, and interpretation leads to heresy.

That's wildly oversimplified -- I don't want to make MT barf over a 100pp. comment -- but that's what I think.

Posted by at 4:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A question thrown out into the big bad world:

Why would a Methodist preacher find the Book of Psalms a particularly attractive source of texts from which to preach sermons? What do you know about the Book of Psalms (Meg, I'm looking in your direction).

Posted by at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Friday and Saturday were awesome research days at the British Library. I found some really juicy stuff that's going to be very useful. I was there yesterday from 9:30 until closing at 5:00 yesterday, and I was so excited by what I was finding that I didn't want to leave.

My time has not been filled only with work, however. Friday night I saw a very good production of Henry IV Part 1 with Laurie and her friend Jessica at the National Theatre. Tuesday night we'll catch the second part. Jessica totally kicks ass for landing tickets to supposedly sold-out shows.

Last night my friend Nancy and I headed out to the hip joint of the moment, which goes by the name of the Boogaloo. It's supposed to be the place to see and be seen, but it seemed just like any other pub I've been to in London. Well, there was one difference: the beer was about twice as expensive. Still, it was fun to hang out there, and the way the juke box works is pretty cool. The rumor is that Coldplay went there once to take in (or contribute to) the vibe and got angry when no one recognized them.

Today was an eighteenth-century geek's idea of paradise. Nancy and I shared a delicious lunch at a Thai restaurant, then visited Dennis Severs' House (see photo below), which is one part living history site and two parts happening.

Subsequently, we walked up City Road to John Wesley's chapel, built in the 1760s, and to Bunhill Fields, the Nonconformists' cemetery right across the street.

The Museum of London was our next stop, and coincidentally enough, there is a sculpture next to the entrance that marks the site of John Wesley's conversion experience; Wesley described feeling a "strange warming of the heart" while walking along Aldersgate Street. Not exactly the most dramatic of descriptions given that some of Wesley's evangelical peers were passing out and speaking in tongues.

The Museum of London is a well-done presentation of the history of the city, with artifacts from the last several hundred years. We each bought a reproduction of a 1745 London map, and then headed straight for the Restoration and eighteenth-century sections, which has an exhibit on the Great Fire of 1666, and then several other exhibits organized thematically around themes like "printing" or "prison." Perhaps I'm making it sound too dry, but it really is well done. I especially like this "sermon glass".

Next on the agenda: more walking! We ended up at a pub for a couple of pints of John Courage (produced by a brewery founded in 1787), and capped off the day with dinner at an Indian restaurant of my favorite kind.

Now I'm going to bed...

Continue reading "busy few days" »

Posted by at 5:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just a quick note here, dear reader, as I'm grabbing some free WiFi in a dining hall with an etiquette notice forbidding the use of laptops. My flight over was fine, and I managed to put in a brief appearance yesterday at the British Library, even though my lack of sleep made me feel like a real zombie, not just the Internet kind. As fate would have it, I encountered a former student who is now finishing up his PhD in English. I last saw him when he was a freshman in one of my sections of intro to British literature at the University of Maryland. Time flies!

I'm looking at British evangelical periodicals at the BL, and I may have more to say about the fruits of my research in the coming days. Or I may keep it to myself until print publication. What's interesting is that I'm seeing the same names involved in these publishing ventures crop up again and again.

There's also a thread I want to follow involving the controversy surrounding the claim of a publisher that a certain set of printed sermons represent the authentic words of a particular preacher who, conveniently enough for the publisher, happened to be dead at the time of publication. The sermons were purportedly taken down in shorthand by an audience member, then transcribed, then printed. This is one of those threads you don't expect to find, but that you are obliged to follow once you do. You know me: I'm a sucker for the whole "speech-script-print" thing

Oh, and I bought a surprisingly affordable CD-ROM of "the world’s earliest complete survival of a dated printed book."

Posted by at 2:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Historian David Hempton's well researched and lucidly written Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (I'm two chapters in, but already completely sold) is a much needed addition to the scholarship on this influential religious movement:

The problem before us, therefore, is the disarmingly simple one of accounting for the rise of Methodism from its unpromising origins among the flotsam and jetsam of religious societies and quirky personalities in England in the 1730s to a major international religious movement some hundred and fifty years later. During that period Methodism refashioned the old denominational order in the British Isles, became the largest Protestant denomination in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, and gave rise to the most dynamic world missionary movement of the nineteenth century. For all these reasons, there are grounds for stating that the rise of Methodism was the most important Protestant religious development since the Reformation, yet it remains remarkably under-researched. (2)

Hempton has a way of contrasting historical data in striking ways, such as the fact that by the end of the nineteenth century there were more African-American Methodists in the United States than there were Methodists in all of Europe. Clearly by this point the U.S. had become the "power-house of world Methodism" (4).

As for me, I'm interested in the earliest decades of development in Britain (and specifically with the ways that communication practices and technologies were important to early Methodism), but this work certainly provides me with a valuable perspective and a longer historical view. I can only hope to produce a book so well written and persuasively argued.

Geez, I sound like such a fanboy.

Posted by at 8:37 PM | Permalink

The Mundus Gateway is a web-based guide to more than four hundred collections of overseas missionary materials held in the United Kingdom. These materials, comprising the archives of British missionary societies, collections of personal papers, printed matter, photographs, other visual materials and artefacts, are held in a large number of libraries, record offices and other institutions in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Mundus Gateway makes it easier for researchers to locate these collections and obtain sufficient information about their contents to enable effective planning of research visits.

Of particular interest to my research: (Wesleyan) Methodist Missionary Society

Posted by at 3:00 PM | Permalink

The Mundus Gateway is a web-based guide to more than four hundred collections of overseas missionary materials held in the United Kingdom. These materials, comprising the archives of British missionary societies, collections of personal papers, printed matter, photographs, other visual materials and artefacts, are held in a large number of libraries, record offices and other institutions in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The Mundus Gateway makes it easier for researchers to locate these collections and obtain sufficient information about their contents to enable effective planning of research visits.

Of particular interest to my research: (Wesleyan) Methodist Missionary Society

Posted by at 3:00 PM | Permalink

I have been searching my notes in vain for reference to a practice I remember reading about.

I can remember learning that in the eighteenth century Anglo-American world, members of a religious community would gather to listen to letters from abroad (concerning spiritual matters) being read out loud.

Am I imagining this, or is this a well-known practice that somehow slipped below the radar of my note-taking habits?

Cross posted at C18-L

Posted by at 10:30 PM | Permalink

Making my work public, dear reader, I provide for your reading pleasure a couple of questions I've just posted to c18-L, the email discussion group for eighteenth-century studies:

Continue reading "18th-C British Religious Periodicals" »

Posted by at 4:38 PM | Permalink

Edit: Added more info later in the day. I saw Wilco perform last night, and they were great! A small club, and I was right next to the stage. An English band called Clearlake opened, and while they were a little rough around the edges in their performance, I think I'll probably check out some of their recordings. Nels Cline, the avant garde jazz guitarist touring with Wilco, used everything from a metal spring to (I think) a film canister to get sounds out of his guitar, plus he had about 20 effects pedals around him. Great stuff.

I spent today at the oldest public library in the English speaking world: Chetham's Library. I examined about a half dozen Bibles from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They contain a variety of marginalia, but nothing that compares to what I found in Bradburn's diary. What I'm after is the ways in which people used their Bibles, and in addition to sermons and essays on how best to read the scriptures, we have marks written on pages by readers. The sample size, so far, is way too small to come to any definite conclusions, however. I'm still trying to decide how best to construct the comparisons; I'd like to determine how unusual or common Bradburn's practice was. Suggestions are welcome.

Here are some research issues I'm dealing with:

• I could be wrong, but I think libraries with special collections are not so likely to have Bibles with a great deal of marginalia. Rare books may have been purchased because they do not have all the marks of reading that scholars like me are interested in. Books with a great deal of writing in them could have been considered less valuable when the purchases were made, unless the book belonged to someone famous. Then the marginalia would make the book more valuable. I'm looking for Bibles belonging to ordinary folks, although I certainly wouldn't turn down the opportunity to examine, say, Jonathan Swift's Bible.
• Even if I do find marginalia in an eighteenth-century Bible, I can't be sure who put them there. Libraries often, but not always, know who owned a particular book before they bought it (i.e. the book's provenance), but we can't be sure if that person is the one who wrote in it.
• Even if I do find marginalia in an eighteenth-century Bible, I can't be sure that they were put there in the eighteenth century. They may have been added in the nineteenth century, which will provide information about reading practices in that century, but not in the one I'm interested in.
• I am sure that eighteenth-century marginalia is sitting on the pages of Bibles published in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, but how to find those Bibles? I know of one example that I intend to examine, but library catalogues usually record the date of publication, not the dates of marginalia. I have to say, though, that Chetham's Library's online catalogue has excellent, detailed bibliographical notes on their rare books, and I was able to determine when, according to the archivists, the marginalia in particular books were created.
• Finally, marginalia require interpretation before they will yield information about reading practices. For example, what do all those crosses in Bradburn's Bible mean? Were they texts of sermons he heard? Or were they, as I am hypothesizing, texts of sermons he preached? These questions are only the tip of the iceberg.

Chetham's has on display one of only 5 seventeenth-century handpresses in England. There are only 70 in the world. I didn't realize they were so rare. Perhaps once new presses were developed, there was no reason to preserve the old ones. Of course, the fact that they were made out of wood, rather than the iron of later presses, probably didn't help their longevity, much.

In keeping with the day's early modern theme, I took a break for lunch and had oysters on the half shell at Sinclair's Oyster Bar, which dates from the 16th or 17th century (or 18th) depending on whom you ask.

Tomorrow I finish at the Methodist Archives (for this year), and then I'm off to the British Library in London. I'm meeting a colleague whose speciality is the Renaissance, and we're gonna party like it's 1688! (1688...anyone?...anyone?...Bueller?)

Posted by at 4:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's a moment when you're crossing all the time zones at 625 miles per hour, when the light in the sky no longer looks normal, when flight attendants have brought you a meal and you're not sure if you're supposed to be hungry or not but you eat it anyway. There's a moment when the hands just fall off the face of the clock, the gears slip loose from the spring, and you have no idea what time it is. I started thinking of this as "zero time." The passage of time eludes your senses. I kept doing the math, and it didn't seem to help. The inside of the Boeing 777 offered no usual indicators of time, and the trip here to England seemed to be over before I knew it. I managed only about 2 hours of fitful sleep.

I'm researching Methodist communications networks in eighteenth-century Britain: preaching, letter writing, diaries, publishing, reading, writing, listening, sharing. The first day in the library was pretty spacey due to lack of sleep, but I managed to get some good work done, returning to the inventory of books that was completed upon John Wesley's death in 1791. It's a very detailed snapshot of Methodist publishing activity in the late eighteenth-century.

Next, I returned to the Bible of Methodist lay preacher Samuel Bradburn, obsessively recording as many details from it as possible. This book is filled with marginalia, most of it in the form of fat "iron crosses" next to particular verses, which I take to be his system for reminding himself which texts to use when he preaches. Over a thousand of them are spread throughout just about every book in both the Old and New Testament. As far as I know, no one has ever written about the ways in which preachers customize their Bibles to improve their use as tools like this. I don't know how many Bibles that look like this survive from the eighteenth century, and I did not expect to find it: I just opened what I thought would be a box of Bradburn's personal papers and there it was.

I also got a tour of the boxes and boxes of manuscript material downstairs. Librarians and archivists are wonderful people, listening to what you're interested in and then pointing you towards what you need. And each box seemed to contain something unexpected. There are dozens of boxes containing thousands of pages, and as with most special collections, the level of cataloguing with most of the material is relatively general: you know the box contains the papers of so-and-so, but you don't necessarily know what those papers are. Diary? Receipt book? Letters? It's a treasure hunt. Fun and scary at the same time. What if I miss the best stuff? What if what I hope to find isn't here? What if it doesn't exist?

If you want to see something silly and fun, Manchester is currently doing the CowParade.

And just for yucks, here's a brief playlist of Manchester music in roughly chronological order:

• Buzzcocks, "Just Lust"
• Joy Division, "Digital"
• New Order, "Blue Monday"
• The Smiths, "Boy With the Thorn in His Side"
• Badly Drawn Boy, "Pissing in the Wind"

Note: last year's Manchester Adventure starts here.

Posted by at 10:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

PBS has an interesting program called Religion and Ethics (If you live in the U.S., use this tool to see when it airs in your region. Here in KC it comes on at 12:30 on Sundays on KCPT.) This weekend "American Evangelicals," part 1 of 4, will be shown.

Relevant resources at the PBS site:

• Poll: America's Evangelicals More and More Mainstream But Insecure: Diversity, Differences Mark Their Views on Society, Culture, Politics
• Related Books
• Commentary on the poll by John Green
• Commentary on the Poll by Anna Greenberg

Posted by at 9:00 AM | Permalink

If we need a Constutional amendment banning gay marriage, does that mean that the Constitution as it is currently written permits gay marriage?

Let's face it. Conservatives are obsessed with sexual intercourse, and by that I don't mean that they are particularly in favor of it or that they are glad when people enjoy it.

No, what I mean is that conservatives have decided that out of every single "sin" or "virtue" that humans have ever put forward as something to be avoided or embraced, humping is the one that we need to pay most attention to.

"It must be regulated," says the American political party that makes the most noise about getting the government out of our lives. "What you do in your bedroom is our business. We'll decide what does and does not go on there. Marriage? Why, that's just an excuse to have sex. And it's really about reproduction. Always has been. So if you're not going to reproduce then no marriage for you. Well, we'll make exceptions for straight people who can't have kids, but that's it!"

In college I had a conservative Christian fundamentalist roommate who said he couldn't wait to get married so he could have sex. Oh, so that's what marriage is for. Check. Thanks for the clarification. God can't get you if have sex when you're married. You're safe! It's a free pass!

Now wait a minute. You're telling me the gays want to get married, too? But that's our holy humping ground! They're gonna ruin everything! Marriage is no longer a safe place if the gays are there, too! How is God going to tell the good humping from the bad humping?

Avarice? Anger? Envy? Greed? Pride? Sloth? None of them hold a candle to Lust in the eyes of the right wing. Well, maybe Sloth. Cadillac driving welfare queens and all that. No need for a Constitutional amendment inspired by staggering acts of avarice and greed, apparently. War profiteering? How dare you even think those words! No, what the country needs to be most concerned with now is the gays.

Does marriage continue into the afterlife? If so, how does divorce work? Do human laws alter what happens in eternity? And if this world is merely a holding station for the hereafter, as GOP "Christians" surely believe, then isn't my body just an arbitrary shell for my soul? Does my penis go with me when I die? If so, do I at least get a nice clutch purse to carry it in?

Do conservatives honestly believe God is as obsessed with sex as they are?

Put yourself in God's shoes for a minute. Admittedly, maybe God doesn't wear shoes. God might not even have feet. But imagine for a minute what it's like to be responsible for the entire universe. You've probably got a pretty busy schedule what with stars devouring each other and black holes causing havoc. You know how it is. Just when you get things the way you like them something falls over or gets spilled.

Next thing you know, someone who keeps calling himself one of your chosen people is praying to you, and because you feel kind of bad about never straightening them out on the whole nomenclature thing, this is a call you feel you have to take. "God, the gays are doing it! I mean they're not even ashamed about it or anything. They're ... you know ... doing it! I think you know what I mean, God. Don't make me spell it out."

I have to imagine at this point God heaves a big sigh. All this work at creating an unimaginably vast universe. Beauty as far as the eye can see. Untold numbers of creatures just on this one planet. It would take millions of years just to catalogue all the species and all the variations to be found, much less figure out how to best take care of them.

And what does God get? The greatest number of messages are from the kids who take the short bus to church, the ones who keep asking, "Is this going to be on the test?" The ones who miss the big picture. The ones who never stop feeling bad about feeling good.

It has to be a little frustrating, don't you think?

Posted by at 7:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)