Chris > Recent Status Updates

I wasn’t expecting Trans* Elon Musk, but I’ll take him!

Oh, what a refreshing read so far. The introduction includes the least-muddled, least-judgmental couple of paragraphs on intersectional knowing I've seen in ages. The first chapter, on political economy, moves nimbly between military-strategic and economic-symbolic politics. That, and the subject matter is both fascinating and timely.

(Of the Renaissance) Although it appeared that the old gods had returned, it was not the gods themselves who came but their power which was incorporated into the one moral God who was free from all demonic disunity. Gods do not die, but neither do they return. They are transformed and enter into the one true God.

Many, many thanks to the production team at Princeton for their editing of the footnotes. I've never seen them so well-implemented in a Kindle book. Ahmed loves his long footnotes, which makes this even more important.

Plopped into the middle of a chapter on witchcraft, possession, etc: An account of convulsing bodies! Hi Foucault! *waves* (I don't have my hard copy handy to check whether these are the same Ursulines, but at minimum they're in the same family.) It's always fun to see his materials show up in sober history.

This is, I think, the third or fourth time Eire has introduced Karlstadt. It's a habit with secondary characters. I wonder if other readers also find that distracting. In fairness, I'd never heard of him before picking up the book, so his name probably bears repeating.

Returning e-book to library. Will return!

In the space of two pges we've had ships called What Are the Civilian Applications and Very Little Gravitas Indeed. I was told to expect a grim story but not quite this degree of accompanying silliness.

Rereading the Short Text. So direct and punchy!

"Sanhedrin" is a transliteration of "synedrion"! That makes so much sense!

"Boris and Natasha"

Probably inevitable to find those names together in a long Russian novel, but I had to smile.

This will probably kill my reading challenge, but I want to get through it before the musical opens on Broadway.

Of all the books to feature a Weird Al reference, and all the moments to feature it. (Context makes me think it's not a coincidence, for what it's worth.)

A man has just taken poison, patriotically, so he can carry a promised gift of pumpkins from the emperor to the underworld. This is not even in the top ten of Bonkers Events in this story, but pumpkins!

They're doing Central European magic psychoanalysis on people driven psychotic by alien trees. It's pretty awesome.

"It is Capitalism's 'coming out' as a *spiritual body* that most interests me." Any relation of 1 Cor 15 to coming-out tropes piques my interest too!

The peace of the sabbath can be viewed as the Jewish "doctrine of justification." Anyone who looks at Israel on the sabbath cannot reproach her with a "righteousness of works."

"At the time of the Rising the terrifying Matron, Aileen Keogh, who cropped her hair, smoked cheroots and for relaxation felled large trees with an axe, cycled to Dublin, threw herself into the fray and was arrested; apparently her guarding officer was an old Mount St Benedict boy who at the sight of her turned tail and fled." Sounds like someone I'd like to meet! As an adult.

It's not when the doppelgänger showed up that things got unsettling for me, or even the narrator's early abuse. It's learning of a sister nobody talks about. Forgetting and shunning are maybe the scariest things in fairy tales.

It contradicts belief in creation of we define the human being's essential quality, and what corresponds to God in him [sic], by subtracting the animal and then regarding what is left as something on its own.

Lovely, lucid treatment throughout the latter part of this chapter of what if anything it could mean to lose or impair the image of God. Best I've seen on the subject.

Re Lk 20:36: The angels are both finite and immortal.

The human being is certainly the living thing with the highest development known to us. But the "crown of creation" is God's sabbath.

The human being is certainly the living thing with the highest development known to us. But the "crown of creation" is God's sabbath.

Qualitative infinity v quantitative endlessness.

We cannot talk about a "contrast" in the relationship between heaven and earth; we can only speak of a complementation. We cannot think of the one as over against or superior to the other; we can only talk about the fellowship and community of God's created beings.

"The Germans have philosophers?" ... I'd read Tacitus. I imagined some hairy barbarian debating in the forests while avoiding the axes of his companions. Sick burn! Of (at minimum) Heidegger and Harold Bloom.

The analogy in which God's creatures "correspond" to him and give him delight, only comes into being when God blesses what he has created.

The crown of creation is not the human being; it is the sabbath.