Reviews and News:
Ross Douthat recommends books for the Trump era.
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The beauty and science of snow.
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Empire of booze: No nation had more influence on wine than 18th-century Britain.
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Why is the word for wine so similar across languages?
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The greatness of small churches: “Dixe Wills’s survey…of 60 tiny churches is catholic with a small ‘c’: Quakers, Methodists, even one Antiochian Orthodox chapel (self-built in Norfolk by a defector from the Anglican ministry), as well as a good few Scottish and Welsh ones. Nearly all have rural settings, and many of these are extremely beautiful. It’s hard to turn the pages without wanting to visit them. Details of services and opening arrangements are provided too.The tone is jaunty, and there is certainly much fun to be had among these toy-like buildings. Bremilham in Wiltshire, for instance, now has just one service a year; only the chancel of the medieval church has survived here, measuring just 11 by 13 ft. So the congregation has to stand on the grass outside.”
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A liberal complains about her tribe: “I am tired of their undisguised contempt for tens of millions of Americans, with no effort to temper their response to the election with humility or empathy. I am tired of their unexamined snobbery and condescension. I am tired of their name-calling and virtue-signaling as signs of supposedly high intelligence. I am tired of their trendiness, jumping on every left-liberal bandwagon that comes along (transgender activism, anyone?) and then acting like anyone not on board is an idiot/hater. I am tired of their shallowness. It’s hard to have a deep conversation with people who are obsessed with moving their kids’ pawns across the board (grades, sports, college, grad school, career) and, in their spare time, entertaining themselves and taking great vacations.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Christian Century, John Fea revisits the successes and criticisms of the Good News translation of the New Testament:
“For a baby boomer named Rick, the cover of Good News for Modern Man evoked a flood of wonderful memories. Responding to an online survey that I conducted on the impact of this version of the Bible, Rick reported that in the late 1960s he was a member of a youth group in California which sang folk-rock Christian songs using acoustic guitars. Rick’s church gave out copies of Good News for Modern Man like candy. As youth group started each week, he and his friends would crowd together ‘and somebody would start tossing—literally tossing—the Testament and a brown Youth for Christ songbook’ to everyone in attendance. Like typical adolescent boys, Rick and his friends got rowdy sometimes, and they used the copies of Good News to beat one another over the head until the youth pastor calmed everyone down.
“Tom, another respondent to the survey, remembered that in 1972 he was a charismatic Catholic participating in an ecumenical Jesus People prayer meeting with Pentecostals. When they weren’t on the ground speaking in tongues (which Tom called a ‘joyous babble in the Spirit’) they were playing ‘Bible roulette’ with their copies of Good News for Modern Man. Someone would randomly read a passage aloud, and one or two people in the group would comment on how the particular passage spoke to them.
“Released by the American Bible Society in September 1966, Good News for Modern Man—subtitled The New Testament and Psalms in Today’s English Version—quickly became a cultural phenomenon and one of the most successful religious publications in American history. For the price of a quarter, the English-speaking public (and eventually the world) could read the Bible in a language that was (in the words of ABS publicity materials) ‘as fresh and immediate as the morning newspaper.’
“Good News for Modern Man was the brainchild of Eugene Nida, an ABS linguist who pioneered the ‘dynamic equivalence’ approach to Bible translation. At the heart of this theory is the idea that the best translation of a Bible text is one that allows readers to forget they are reading a translation at all. Nida was one of the first Bible translation theorists to take the linguistic position of the reader this seriously. A good translation, he argued, would arouse in the reader the same reaction that the writer of the text hoped to produce in his “first and immediate” readers. For Nida, the test of a translation is how well the readers understand the message of the original text, the ease with which they can grasp this meaning, and the level of involvement with the text that a person experiences as a result of reading the translation.”
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“Not everyone was enthusiastic about Good News for Modern Man. Some scholars thought Bratcher’s translation was simplistic, pitched at too low a level of reading ability. Evangelical scholars worried that a thought-for-thought translation rather than word-for-word translation amounted to a paraphrase of scripture and undermined the conviction that every single word of the Bible is inspired by God.”
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Image of the Day: Supermoon over Spanish castle
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Poem: John Montague, “The Trout”
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