Thread. Last year my grandmother went viral on Twitter when I shared the reading list that she had kept for 80 years. Her funeral was on Monday. When she died, she left me a bundle of old diaries

https://twitter.com/_benmyers_/status/1637933878492172289

The oldest one is dated May 1945. It’s a collection of poems and quotes that she copied from her reading during this period

My 94-year-old grandmother has kept a list of every book she ever read since she was 14 years old. Amazing archive of one person’s mind over nearly a century Some of these books have quite a story behind them too. Here is an excerpt from my grandmother’s memoir, about an incident in 1945 when she was given lodging in a German farmhouse (she was a refugee from Yugoslavia at the time)

Origen agrees with Marcion that the devil is sometimes at work in scripture. But he says Marcion was impatient. He rushed to emend scripture instead of checking if there were scribal errors, or if other interpretations were possible While Marcion’s Bible got smaller and smaller, Origen’s Bible—his Hexapla—got bigger and bigger, with multiple versions showing where the texts had been corrupted through copying errors etc. Origen fights the devil with text criticism

To me, the most astounding thing about the greatest teachers of humankind is how little they read. Everything Aristotle ever read in his lifetime fills a couple of volumes on my shelf. Jesus read the scrolls of the Hebrew bible. The Buddha is said to have been unable to read. Even modern examples are still sobering. The protestant reformers knew the church fathers mostly from anthologies of quotations. Even Milton’s vast learning was deep rather than wide; it would not take too long to read all the books that Milton ever read

One of the most shocking scenes in Paradise Lost is when Eve falls in love with her own image. She has just been created from Adam's rib and has woken to consciousness. She hasn't seen Adam yet. The first thing she sees is a gorgeous figure reflected on the surface of a lake It is love at first sight. Eve has no prior experience so she doesn't know it's her own image. She looks lovingly at her reflection and it returns "answering looks". She tells Adam later that she would have gladly "fixed/Mine eyes till now and pined with vain desire" forever

George Herbert's allegorical poem 'The Quip' features the archetypal temptations of Beauty, Money, and Glory. Intriguingly, he lists a 4th one too: 'Wit-and-Conversation'. It says a lot about the 17th century that the desire for wit is ranked alongside the other great temptations At first I found this totally eccentric. The idols of sex, wealth, glory I can easily understand - but who would sell their soul for witty conversation? Then I remembered Twitter.

Our liberal arts undergraduates do a 6,000 word research project in their final year. This year, instead of assigning a research paper, I allowed one student to do a 6,000 word commentary on part of the last canto of Dante’s Paradiso. The result was quite spectacular It made me think I should be using this kind of assessment task more often and not relying so heavily on student essays

When Paradise Lost was first published in 1667, Milton had it printed with line numbers. No author before Milton had ever been so confident Even St Paul, that other great Christian egotist, was too modest to add his own verse numbers

APA 7th edition - this is a wonderful change and I hope it will spread widely to Chicago and other referencing styles. Including place of publication seems an absurd hangover from pre-internet times Places that will soon be forgotten forever, and which may not even have been real places to begin with:

Grand Rapids
New Haven
Cambridge, MA
Harmondsworth [almost certainly not a real place]
Farnham
Aldershot

Speaking of Jean Vanier, is there a link here to the weird preoccupation with ‘nuptial’ mysticism in modern catholic theology? In catholic theology, it seems like sex is either nothing or everything. It’s either the gateway of original sin or a gateway into transcendence. It’s never allowed to be just sex

Adolf von Harnack’s ‘Essence of Christianity’ (1900) already seemed a bit naive and old-fashioned by the time Karl Barth criticised it. But when you read it today, much of it could almost be mistaken for a cutting-edge statement on faith as a social praxis etc Probably the only point that would be truly unfashionable today is Harnack’s lofty Germanic disdain for Eastern Orthodoxy. In his estimation it has not a single redeeming feature

Went to see A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, then went home and read the Esquire article on which the film was based (a magnificent piece of writing), then spent a whole afternoon watching YouTube clips of Mr Rogers. Beautiful way to spend a day. I'm sorry to say I had never heard of this person until today. I don't think his show was ever broadcast in Australia. We grew up with Sesame Street and the Muppet Show but no Mr Rogers, which seems a bit heartbreaking to me now.

Best books I read in 2019:

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture

Taylor Reid, Daisy Jones & the Six

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy

John Behr, John the Theologian

Andrew Roberts, Churchill

Ian Kershaw, Hitler

John Barton, History of the Bible

Gordon Teskey, The Poetry of John Milton Of all these, the absolute #1 read for me was Peter Gay’s Weimar Culture - written in the 60s but I never read it till now. It is a TERRIFIC book

“O Holy Night” is adapted from the French original “Minuit, chretiens”. The English version amplifies the theme of humility but suppresses the (very French) themes of power, boldness, and solidarity: “Peuple debout! Chante ta délivrance!—People arise, sing your liberation!” With the verse about slavery it still comes across as a very socially engaged Christmas carol, but the chorus (“fall on your knees”) puts the focus back on individual piety. But the original is much more emphatically a song about the social meaning of Christmas

I love it when I get to help my teenage children with their literature assignments. I spend the first hour helping them to unlearn all the things they’ve been taught at school. The latest one was an assignment on Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. The teacher had taught them to use big technical words like “anthropomorphic”. I’d never read the book before but it took exactly 5 seconds to see that it has no anthropomorphic elements at all.

I’m thinking of submitting a paper on why theology shouldn’t necessarily be done “for the life of the church”

https://twitter.com/ColloquiumANZ/status/1196229806779551744

Especially in the Australian context, where nearly all theological institutions are denominationally funded and operated, “doing theology for the church” has a sinister ring to it

Excerpt from my new essay on the theology of Benedict XVI And another excerpt, on the gospel and Greek philosophy

U2’s Joshua Tree concert in Brisbane was the worst sound quality I’ve ever heard—and that includes the time I woke to the sound of cats fighting on a tin roof. Poor Bono kept trying to talk to the crowd but we were stupefied: we had no idea what he was saying. We grinned encouragingly and assumed that it was all sound humanitarian advice; but it’s just not the same when you can’t distinguish any of the syllables

I've been asked to write an endorsement for a book by CS Lewis. Always glad to lend a hand to another struggling author I'll try not to sound too condescending

Best lyric from the new Kanye album:

John 8:33
We the descendants of Abraham
Ye shall be made free

Where “Ye” functions both as a biblical quotation and as Kanye’s name. It’s an act of gigantic egotism to find one’s own autobiography in the words of the Bible. It’s not that different from the Christian egotism of St Paul and Augustine and Milton and Blake

Recently a publisher asked me to review a book manuscript that they'd received 10 years after the submission deadline. One of the things I learned is that a book doesn't necessarily get better the longer you work on it Over time, an author can invest heavily in parts of the book that are really just structural flaws that needed to be excised. As an author, it's easy to succumb to what economists call the 'sunk cost' fallacy