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.