To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
20
Nov
2019
We had some unexpected immigrants drop in at our house recently. A couple, I assume; they’re always together. And they literally dropped in -- out of the sky, onto our bird feeder.
Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds defines them as ringed turtle-doves. The description is clear and precise -- they could be nothing else.
Pigeons have been around for a long time. It was a pigeon that Noah released from his ark, to see if there were green shoots growing anywhere. And a pigeon that settled on Jesus as he came up out of the Jordan River after his baptism.
This particular species was probably imported from southern Africa or Asia as household pets. Peterson calls them “a domestic-bred variant of the African turtle-dove…seen very locally in city parks in Los Angeles, rarely elsewhere.”
Which raises some uncomfortable questions.
Did someone move Los Angeles?
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: Bible, immigrants, turtle-doves, Roger Tory Peterson
12
Dec
2018
Every year, my old friend Kenn Ward sets up a Nativity scene in his front yard in Winnipeg.
Many of us have indoor Nativity scenes, often called a creche. And we never set the figures up exactly the same way each year. Joseph and Mary and the baby Jesus take centre stage, of course. But the shepherds, the visitors from the east, the animals – they get shuffled around, depending on what we feel is the essential theme of the story, this year.
Kenn has that problem too, with the bigger figures for his outdoor creche. “I never know quite what to expect,” he wrote on Facebook. “Usually one of the figures, or a group of them, insist that they have been neglected and deserve more prominence in the scene. There is often a clash of egos…
Tags: Bible, Nativity, creche
8
Aug
You’ve probably seen pictures of cuneiform writing – little wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay tablets. They go back to the Mesopotamian cultures of the Tigris-Euphrates valley, many millennia ago.
In school, I was told, cuneiform was a primitive form of accounting. Lacking pen and paper – let alone computers and spreadsheets – the ancient tribes of what is now called Iraq used soft clay tablets to record the number of sheep or bags of wheat someone had bought or sold. It was just a numbering system, I understood.
Of course, I didn’t bother thinking that those ancient traders also needed symbols for sheep and wheat they were trading.
Most of those clay tablets eventually returned to the mud from whence they came. But a few were baked, to preserve them longer. And some got baked, unintentionally, when marauding tribes burned houses and granaries.
Tags: Bible, cuneiform, Ugaritic, Phonetic alphabet, Phoenician, creation
24
Jun
For a hundred years, the Canadian government took children from their parents and incarcerated them in Indian Residential Schools. For their own good.
The feds have since issued apologies. They’ve paid around $5 billion in compensation. And all governments have paid many billions more in welfare, prisons, and social assistance.
In the 1950s, the B.C. government took Doukhobor children away from their families, and locked them up in a prison camp in New Denver. For the children’s own good, of course.
In the 1960s, various governments did the Sixties Scoop. Once again Indigenous children were separated from their parents and placed with white foster families. For their own good, of course.
We’re now reaping a bitter harvest of alcoholism and drug dependency, of depression and suicide, of adults who don’t know how to be parents.
And then the Trump administration set a policy of removing children from parents who enter the United States illegally, and locking the children up in detention centres.
Can’t we ever learn from past mistakes?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: verses, Bible, Jeff Sessions, St. Paul, Romans, government
May
This week, the U.S. moved its embassy from Tel Aviv on Israel’s Mediterranean coast to Jerusalem. The move fulfilled one of President Donald Tweet’s campaign promises. The president sent his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to represent the American Empire.
Jerusalem epitomizes all that’s wrong with U.S. foreign policy.
Kushner had no foreign policy experience at all, prior to being appointed the White House’s “Senior Advisor” with particular emphasis on Middle Eastern issue. But he is Jewish.
U.S. foreign policy treats the Bible as the final word on anything related to Jews. And, by extension, to anything related to the Middle East.
Let’s be clear – the Bible does state that the legendary King David chose Jerusalem as the capital of the new nation he had formed from the warring tribes descended from Jacob’s sons. That’s a selective reading, though. It ignores the Bible’s own testimony that David chose that site specifically because it did NOT form part of traditional Jewish territories.
Tags: Bible, Trump, Jerusalem, David, Jebusites, embassy