Vetus Latina : The Old Latin Bible

Before Jerome and the Vulgate  - and long before Urban VIII - there was the Old Latin Bible. Strictly speaking I think it is more a case of old Latin Bibles since there were several versions circulating of at least some of the books. Jerome himself produced two versions of the Psalms, the first a revision of Old Latin version and the second a direct translation of the Hebrew. (The whole matter of the Latin psalms, particularly as they have been adapted for liturgical use is extremely puzzling and I have never got it straight).

In Callista : A Tale of the Third Century Newman describes the home of a Christian living near Carthage just before the Decian persecution struck.

Prince takes a phone call

Prince Rogers Nelson himself is woken up by one of his entourage. Worth it to hear how he ends the call. Via Tim Blair. No idea how to make it embed in widescreen.

The end of the Euro?

Some talk of the Grexit. Others think all the Euro countries should go their own way: Grexeunt omnes pursued by a bear (market). Heheh.

Flying in the face of truth

My moral theology class wanted to hear stories about my time in the Oxford movement and I had promised to spend some time doing just that. Nevertheless they did have an exam the next day and I wanted to be sure that they were able to use technical terms properly. So I opened the class as follows:

But first - business - economy, class, is the term from moral theology to discuss the telling of a falsehood. It is distinguished from lying because it is sometimes held that the telling of a falsehood may not be wrong - i.e. a lie - but still a falsehood hence economy. This is why Newman has a discussion in an appendix to the Apologia on the Economy. He is not discussing the balance of trade or anything like that.

Caine's Arcade

Reminds me of someone.

Mankowski: What Went Wrong?

Robert Conquest says somewhere that the “behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies". Of couse, he means enemies of the organization: the idea of a bureaucracy being taken over by its enemies fills me with a mixture of hilarity and dread.

That reminds me of Fr Paul Mankowski SJ's paper from July 2003 (I blog slow but exceeding fine): What Went Wrong?

In thousands and thousands of pages of records one scarcely, if ever, is edified by a pleasant surprise, by discovering that a bishop’s or superior’s concern for the victim or for the Faith was greater than that known to the public, that the engines of justice were geared up and running at full throttle, but in a manner invisible to those outside the circle of discretion. Didn’t happen.

A brief shock

Putting http://www.merton.ac.uk into a browser gave an alarming result. It seemed the alma mater had closed down.

I had left out the ox.

Naming South Australia

Somebody was asking I was boring somebody about Adelaide names. Tim Blair attributes the observation of the peculiarities of the names of Adelaideans to Alex Buzo. Examples (some of them spoofs, d'uh): Bright Greene, Pullen Hare, Falkland Waugh, Clayvel Badcock, Steele Hall. Blair also passed on a method of creating your own name for when you move to that bright thrusting city of the late 1950s. All this comes up again because somebody thinks South Australia should change its name (note to non Australians, Adelaide is the capital of the state of South Australia). Naturally Blair is on the case.

Kyrie eleison ©

One of the things boring in an interesting way I would like to understand is how copyright law applies to the liturgical books. This post nibbles at the edges. The title says it all: The Catastrophe of Catholic Copyrights.

Hyperdox Herman

You need a Facebook account for this. (Yes yes, I know). He has an archenemy Cradle Christopher. Hilarious.

The last word in wills and testaments

Today's EelsDeals™ is a whopping 65% off a computerised Will programme. It is called the Will-O-Matic. Since we are dealing with lawyers we have to be careful, but it is a surprising choice of name. And that is all I will say.

From the email:

The Universe is 93 billion light years across

(That's 28 billion parsecs if you are Luke Skywalker.)

The size of the Universe, and all that it contains:


Copyright 2012. Magnifying the Universe by Number Sleuth.

Presumably they meet on Wednesdays

Vatican Insider, 6th  May 2012

The response sent to the Vatican on 17 April by Bishop Bernard Fellay will be examined in the next few days by the cardinal and bishop members in Ordinary Session of the Congregation of the Doctrine for the Faith, commonly known as Feria Quarta.

Living first and foremost as the beneficiary of a bounty

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius (2004).

Part Two: Jesus Christ, Excursus: Christian Structures
4, The law of excess or superfluity, (p. 260).

…he who is always calculating how much he must do to be just adequate and to be able to regard himself, after a few casuistical flicks, as a man with a nice, white shirtfront, is still no Christian. And similarly, he who tries to reckon where duty ends and where he can gain a little extra merit by an opus superogatorium is a Pharisee, not a Christian. Being a Christian does not mean duly making a certain obligatory contribution and perhaps, as an especially perfect person, even going a little further than is required for the fulfillment of the obligation. On the contrary, a Christian is someone who knows that in any case he lives first and foremost as the beneficiary of a bounty and that, consequently, all righteousness can only consist in being himself a donor, like the beggar who is grateful for what he receives and generously passes part of it on to others.

We are all Americans now

(And not in a good way.)

From Vatican Insider:

She could have been Britain’s First Lady but she chose to become a Benedictine nun. 44 year old Laura Adshead dated British Prime Minister, David Cameron, from spring 1990 to summer 1991. In 2008, after seeing her life slip more and more deeply into a spiral of gossip, alcohol and drugs, the dazzling blond decided to take her vows as a Benedictine nun, becoming Sister John Mary.

Did anyone tell this "First Lady"?

I do not think it means what you think it means

(In case you don't know who Craig Thomson is.)

The statement:



The correction:

Returning

Why do I keep deleting the Safari icon from the dock? Perhaps my subsconscious is trying to tell me something. Or perhaps it is because it is directly below where I pinch the corner of excessively large windows to shrink them.