• If you’re a podcast person, this is a terrific episode of an always interesting podcast, “The Bible for Normal People.” Here is Pete Enns in conversation with David Dark on “Doubt as a Holy Task.”
Podcasts are usually listens, not “reads,” but there’s a full transcript at the link. It’s less a conversation about “doubt” as the opposite of faith than about doubt as the opposite of arrogance.
• Recovering MK Holly Berkley Fletcher on “What the pro-life movement could have learned from the temperance movement.”
I think Fletcher concedes too many of the presumptions of the “pro-life movement” here but, as David says in the link above, “a person is a process,” and I also suspect that this reflexive conceding is still, for Fletcher, in process. The central point here, though, the main lesson she sees in this parallel, is both insightful and constructive.
• Jennifer Byrne visits the Great American Alligator Museum in New Orleans and reflects on “How Alligators and Humans Became Friends—Kind Of.”
“Humans have a very complicated relationship” with alligators, says Nathan Drake, a historian at Mississippi State University who wrote about the history of humans’ “lasting and unique” relationship with alligators in his dissertation.
“Fear is always there,” but there’s also warmth, says Drake.
The fear is sensible — these things can kill you. And that fear led to efforts to eradicate these toothy cold-blooded neighbors of ours. But surprisingly, that wasn’t the end of the story.
I’m still sort of amazed by the ordinariness of the presence of alligators in places like Florida. People seem as nonchalant about a gator in the local pond as we are here in Chester County about all the deer grazing on our hostas. Then again, those deer kill way more people every year than alligators ever have.
• Also from Atlas Obscura, here’s Colin Dickey on “The Tale of the Mad Stone, the One-Time ‘Cure’ for Rabies.”
The really interesting thing here, to me, is the way the folklore around Mad Stones prevented this purportedly magical cure from becoming a grift: “Sutton had treated more than a thousand people with his mad stone, never charging anyone, as the objects were sometimes said to lose their efficacy if they were involved in monetary transactions.”
The elaborate, time-consuming ritual of applying a Mad Stone to a potential rabies victim is exactly the kind of hokum that a con artist would concoct to fleece some worried or desperate family out of all of their money. But usually, it seems, this ritual was performed as an act of service or duty, without charge.
Mad stones are “bezoars” — “a real phenomenon that occurs in ruminants whereby a mass of swallowed matter is compacted into a small, hard orb that is passed through the animal’s digestive tract.” Bezoars are rare, but they seem more common among deer in areas rich in limestone. So, it seems, the woods out back should be prime territory for bezoar-hunting. Hmmm.
• Robert Skvarla sends “A Postcard From The First Annual Bucks County Para-Con.”
The event was confined to a small section of a performing arts center at Bucks County Community College, so vendors were grouped in one row leading towards the theater. This meant mediums and psychics were placed alongside vampire hunters and MUFON flacks, creating a true melting pot of high strangeness. You could align your chakras while learning about the latest developments in UFO disclosure.
My favorite nugget is this bit: “Pope railed against elements in the government that were preventing disclosure, at one point revealing unnamed members of Congress stood in the way because of a belief extraterrestrial life might be demonic entities.”
• Philip Jenkins on “How to Forge a Bogus Secret Gospel.”
Jenkins is one of my favorite bloggers because he’s endlessly curious and so his next post might be about anything. And even when you think you’ve got a handle on where that next post is going, it may zig off into some whole other apparently unrelated — but then apparently very related — topic.
This post is about a disputed “Secret Gospel of Mark,” so you’d expect it to be all about first-century papyrus and Dead Sea Scrolls and whatnot. But mostly it’s about, instead, two now-obscure mid-century novels — one an evangelical thriller and the other an academic satire. Philip Jenkins may be the only person to have read both of them. … Well, Philip Jenkins and also Morton Smith, the forger who created the “Secret Gospel of Mark.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In