1787 Constitutional Convention

James Madison makes the most of his historical opportunities at the Constitutional convention.

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Seated front-row center was James Madison, who staked out this pivotal spot to take minutes. “In this favorable position for hearing all that passed … I was not absent a single day, nor more than a casual fraction of an hour in any day, so that I could not have lost a single speech, unless a very short one.” One observer said that the diminutive Virginian, bent over his notes, had “a calm expression, a penetrating blue eye, and looked like a thinking man.”

-- Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”

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Christianity and Judaism

We have an interesting note relating Christianity to Judaism, on how Christianity tried to live beyond the narrow limits of the letter and the law, but has proven unable to maintain that ideal.

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Paul, whose epistles instructed small Christian communities in the Near East on points of behavior and doctrine, was writing at a time when Christianity was still primarily a Jewish movement. In his desire to emphasize the newness of his faith, and the rupture with Judaism that Jesus Christ represented, he cast the two religions as a series of oppositions. Where Jews read scripture according to the “letter,” the literal meaning, Christians read it according to the “spirit,” as an allegory predicting the coming of Christ. Likewise, where Jews obeyed traditional laws, Christians were liberated from them by faith in Christ—which explained why Gentile converts to Christianity did not need to follow Jewish practices like circumcision. To “Judaize,” to use a word Paul coined, meant to be a prisoner of this world, to believe in the visible rather than the invisible, the superficial appearance rather than the true meaning, law rather than love. More than a theological error, Judaism was an error in perception and cognition, a fundamentally wrong way of being in the world.

The problem, as Nirenberg argues in the richest sections of his book, is that this is an error to which Christians themselves are highly prone. Paul and the early Christians lived in the expectation of the imminent end of the world, the return of Christ, and the establishment of the new Jerusalem. As the end kept on not coming, it became necessary to construct a Christian way of living in this world. But this meant that Christians would have need of law and letter, too, that they would need to “Judaize” to some degree.

-- Adam Kirsch, reviewing David Nirenberg's "Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition"

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Coco and Mom

It is nice to see Coco sharpening his claws on Mom's old plumb tree. I much prefer that to her using me.

Pi says, "Mom? Not Mother?"

Monk says, "Yeah, I guess it's funny. Now that more years separate us, I guess I feel like using the more affectionate term, rather than the cold authoritarian 'Mother'. I can even feel a little like a nine-year-old boy and running up to her. Funny. This is something new happening in my emotional life. A deeper sign of old age, perhaps."

Daily Fun

A young Australian sea lion is intrigued by its own reflection in the photographer’s underwater camera, Baird Bay, South Australia. Photo Credit: Darren Jew

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