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[calimac]

1. At Rosh Hashanah services, the rabbi gave an impassioned sermon on the need for communitarianism. People who wonder why most Jews are Democrats should have come hear this.

2. Attended the reading by rozk (clever and allusive), Malinda Lo (thrilling) and Cindy Pon (atmospheric) at a tiny screening room in the back of the ground floor of an office building in downtown SF. Now I have to consider buying books.

3. Listening to an obscure overture by Rossini (there's more of them than you think) with a section that I'm sure comes verbatim in some other overture, but I can't remember which one. [Ed.: found it!]

4. Reading paper submissions for Tolkien Studies is reminding me of accounts of slushpiles at sf magazines. Chip Delany once recounted an academic who, when asked why he didn't mention Bester's The Demolished Man in his paper where it would have been relevant, asked "Is this something I should have heard of?" I just encountered a similarly yawning gap of knowledge by a purported Tolkien scholar, and my brain hurts.

Comments

[eddyerrol.livejournal.com]

A major theme of much of John Dominic Crossan's writing is the concept, found in the Jewish scriptures, that the land (=all material resources on this Earth) belongs to God; in Leviticus 25:23 God says "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants." Many of the law codes in the Pentateuch (e.g., the remittance of debt and abolishment of slavery in the Jubilee year) were an attempt to help stem the inevitable growth of inequality amongst all of God's people. The point being, that ALL the resources of the Earth are on loan from God, as it were, so that any individual did not necessarily have the right to accumulate more and more of those resources at the expense of other people who also had a right (due to God's call for just distribution of the resources belonging to God) to those resources. This view has a quite a bit of resonance with me.

[eddyerrol.livejournal.com]

I should add that in Crossan's view, Jesus Christ was incarnating that very idea of the Jewish God in his words and actions, which leads to me to add that that's why I think most Christians SHOULD be Democrats (or at least not supporters of the Republican platform) as well!