Archive for the ‘Language and religion’ Category

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The angel of the Lord came down

December 2, 2025

… And glory shone all around

So I sang this afternoon, immersed in the joy of the Christmas season, weeping with pleasure at being able to sing again (and exercise my lungs; my singing is supposed to be both pleasurable and therapeutic), after many weeks of being laid low. And so I write about the hymn tune Sherburne paired with the text of the Christmas carol “While shepherds watched their flocks”, from which comes the angel descending in a shimmer of glory.

Not what I intended to post about today — but the Ernie Kovacs Nairobi Trio comic routine has turned out to be vastly more complex than I originally thought, so I’m going for the fire-bright Christmas angel. Stay tuned for something later about three people in gorilla suits.

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Posted in Holidays, Language and medicine, Language and religion, Music, My life, Poetic form, Signs and symbols | Leave a Comment »

Gods and tables

November 10, 2025

In e-mail from Tony Velasquez on 11/8:

your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing  … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.

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Posted in Ambiguity, Jokes, Language and religion, Language play, Lexical semantics, Philosophy, Semantics, Stanford | Leave a Comment »

Medicine days 2

November 1, 2025

🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate November; it’s a beautiful bright fall day here in Palo Alto, the day after the costumes and candy of Halloween, and also The Day of the Dead, to honor those who have died before us

This posting is a continuation of yesterday’s “Medicine Day”, a list — an alarming inventory — of the medically significant conditions of my life, very roughly in chronological order. I admitted that the list was surely incomplete, and in fact I was driven to get up in the middle of the night to construct a second list, almost as big as the first.

But I will hold that recital of afflictions off for a bit, to entertain you with a note on one of my grand-child Opal’s favorite Halloween candies and one on yellow-orange marigolds for Mexican remembrances of the beloved dead.

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Posted in Art, Events and occasions, Folk beliefs, Holidays, Language and food, Language and medicine, Language and plants, Language and religion, Language and the body | Leave a Comment »

Musical Millbrooks

October 13, 2025

The trigger was singing the shapenote hymn Millbrook, 484t in the 2025 edition — yes, the latest revision, successor to the 1991 revision —  of the Sacred Harp yesterday; I was at home, following along via Zoom with the Palo Alto singers (who were at the UUC church in southern Palo Alto). Four connections here:

— 1, the song comes from the 2013 Shenandoah Harmony book (where it’s 264b), which I’d sung from on occasion (so it was in fact already a favorite); I don’t know why it’s named Millbrook (from Millbrook AL? Millbrook Village NJ? from some specific millbrook?)

— 2, the song has the same name as the much more widely known utterly secular composition “Millbrook” (1998), by singer / songwriter Rufus Wainwright, referring to the very tony New York village of Millbrook — so, two musical Millbrooks

— 3, the village of Millbrook is the home of the Millbrook School, a private boarding school that’s interesting in its own right; and there’s a connection to Rufus Wainwright, who’s a 1991 graduate of the school

— 4, Bill Richardson — a friend from a boys’ summer camp (ca. 1950) / Princeton (ca. 1960) / Wyomissing PA (vs. my West Lawn PA, a couple miles away), now Golden CO vs. Palo Alto CA — is a much earlier graduate of the school (in 1958)

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Posted in Education, Friendship, Language and religion, Music, My life, Poetry | 1 Comment »

Holy Romaine Empire

October 11, 2025

🏳️‍🌈 👨‍❤️‍👨 🏳️‍🌈 National Coming Out Day, and also J&A Day, Jacques and Arnold’s wedding-equivalent anniversary (some explanation of that cooccurrence in an appendix to this posting)

The 10/8 Wayno / Piraro Bizarro strip, posted here because it’s sweetly bizarre (true to the strip’s title), complex, and cleverly goofy (like the one in my 10/9/25 posting “The flannel frontier”); something to enjoy for a moment in the midst of terrible times:


(#1) A phonologically perfect pun (Caesar the salad punning on Caesar the emperor), the pun-like Holy Roman Empire (a German political entity) playing on Roman Empire (governed by the Caesars of Rome), and a phonologically imperfect pun (romaine the salad green punning on Roman) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 4 in this strip — see this Page)

(The two salad puns are Wayno’s; Holy Roman Empire as a pun-like play on Roman Empire is an invention of the Roman Catholic church in Germanic lands in the early Middle Ages.)

The cartoon shows a Caesar (with laurel leaves) appearing before his people, cradling a humongous bowl of salad and waving a pair of salad servers like a weapon (Julius Caesar is often portrayed in Western art as wielding a sword). Next to him, a soldier utters a variant of the ceremonial greeting Hail Caesar! — celebrating not Caesar, but his salad.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Gender and sexuality, History, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and politics, Language and religion, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, My life, Names, Puns | 9 Comments »

September 29th

September 29, 2025

29 September: penultimate September, and also Michaelmas (the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael; the Feast of the Archangels; or the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels). Brief notes about the day; and then, in the midst of very difficult times (during which I am failing at almost everything, and in great pain), a report on some moments of pleasure that help to get me from day to day.

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Posted in Events and occasions, Holidays, Language and religion, Music, My life, Signs and symbols, Singing | Leave a Comment »

5786

September 24, 2025

Today: Rosh Hashanah ends, and it’s the year 5786:

Originally published in ReadTheSpirit.com (Rabbi Roy Furman’s Read the Spirit site)

 

 

Posted in Holidays, Language and religion | Leave a Comment »

Walking on water

August 22, 2025

In the New Yorker issue of 8/25/25, a typically goofy-clever cartoon by Sam Gross, offering SG’s proposal for how Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee:


(#1) No miracle!  But, wait! SG’s account relies on a different kind of miracle — the Octopus of God, gliding supportively underwater, foot to foot, carrying Christ across the sea; that’s the goofy part, God’s really mysterious ways, as the fish have it

(I especially admire SG’s depiction of Jesus as a magical Jew, deep in thought as he navigates.)

Now, for background, the account of Jesus’s aquambulation in the Christian Bible, a collection of texts Christians think of as the New Testament. (I note that SG, a Jew, assumed his readers would be familiar with the story, as part of the common culture of our society; for this, no one involved here has to believe anything.)

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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »

Of money, class, and prejudice

July 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅 Three tigers for ultimate July, while we anticipate the inaugural rabbits of August and the cheese and chocolate of 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day🇨🇭 — we await the edelweiss-bedecked Helvetia!

The territory. Meanwhile, I’ve been re-establishing an old friendship, one that goes back to childhood: Bill and I met at Camp Conrad Weiser, a YMCA-sponsored summer camp in the hills of Wernersville PA (some of these details will become relevant). We were later at Princeton together, and in the summer of 1961 (after my parents had moved on to California, while I continued my job as a reporter on the Reading (PA) Eagle and needed a place to stay), he offered a guest room in his family’s big house on Reading Boulevard in the suburb of Wyomissing —


(#1) An aerial shot of some big houses on Reading Boulevard (a stock photo from an article on Wyomissing as a planned community); there was housing for the rich on the boulevards, with workers’ housing in separate sections of Wyomissing (one of which my father grew up in) and on the side streets along the boulevards, in the adjacent boroughs of West Wyomissing, West Lawn (where I grew up), and West Reading, and in Reading itself

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Posted in Language and religion, My life, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

St. Sebastian without the arrows

July 12, 2025

A surprise on my Pinterest  this morning: a sinesagittal St. Sebastian from Texan artist RF. Alvarez (who offers tender, communal gay machismo, which is Tex-Mex to boot):


(#1) Alvarez, St. Sebastian (2022), aka “Meet me under the pomegranate tree, St. Sebastian” (a self-portrait of the strikingly handsome RFA in the St. Sebastian pose, with a vulnerable but unharmed body, and steadily meeting the viewers’ gaze, conveying neither agony nor ecstasy); the figure here is hooking up with St. Sebastian, and he’s also mirroring St. Sebastian (with his hands behind his back, perhaps tied to a tree, only a bit of drapery barely covering his genitals)

But why a pomegranate tree (not part of Christian legend)? And the deep orange suffusing the figure’s entire body and filling all the background behind him and the tree — another pomegranate allusion (though pomegranate fruits and juice are garnet-red, not citrus-orange)? An allusion to the Greek myth of Persephone and her pomegranate seeds?

I’ve now looked at quite a lot of RFA’s paintings, and this one stands out from all the others, including his other self-portraits (for instance, Self-Portrait with Grandfather’s Hat (2023)). So it cries out for some explication.

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Posted in Art, Color, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and religion, Language and the body, Male art, Myths, Race and ethnicity | Leave a Comment »

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