LinguistFriend: COLLATERAL DAMAGE

The face looking out from the front page of the July 8th Toledo Blade was somehow familiar. I wondered whether the short beard and bicycle helmet were just archetypal, or somehow I had actually seen them and they had stuck in my memory. The main connection I have in Toledo is that I attend a UU church there once or twice a month, but I could not remember seeing him there. The Blade reported that a 66 year old man named Robert Brundage had been assaulted and beaten on June 22 while returning from a civic meeting under the label Jobs with Justice, one of many civic groups he participated in or organized in Toledo, the rustbelt Ohio home town to which he had returned in 1997 after a career as an research scientist and engineer in Massachusetts. Brundage was involved with over twenty civic organizations, probably far too many to maximize effectiveness, thus giving some support to the view of the personal friend who described him with respect and affection as a true eccentric. Ironically, while many of his civic efforts were aimed at bettering the lives of the poor people of Toledo, it was one of those people who assaulted him, breaking his jaw and causing bleeding into the brain, resulting in his death on July 7. And it was a good brain; he had earned a doctorate in biophysics at Brandeis University west of Boston in 1969. We might well have had mutual acquaintances, since I had friends at Brandeis in that period, although primarily in biochemistry. Brundage's topics, such as applied acoustics and biophysics, are close enough to areas in which I have published that I have an idea of how such a person thinks, which creates a sort of immediate intimacy when one meets a previously unknown colleague, for instance at the Acoustical Society. So to some extent I recognized him, although I did not know him.

Dr. John C. Jones, president of the Greater Toledo Urban League, posted on the League's website a memorial on the passing of Brundage, with an important observation. Considering the motivation of his attacker, he wrote, "Make no mistake, the answer is not as simple as "he was a bad kid". We as a community must dig deeper to address and confront the areas of dysfunction that surround our youth, from families to institutions to individuals." Toledo is a city with about 14% overall unemployment of adults of working age. For Afro-Americans such as the young man accused of attacking Bob Brundage, unemployment is appreciably higher. When I lived in Los Angeles, my memory is that at any one time about half of the young black males were in trouble with the legal system. Until recently, for some time one of that number was my adopted youngest son, who stayed and worked in LA after his parents left, and made some poor decisions. To gradually work his way through the legal system until he could become self-supporting again after that cost much of the money I had set aside for retirement. Without those resources, it would have been impossible to ever get him out of the legal maze which has an effect much more destructive than many of the petty crimes that it punishes, with the result that the United States has about one person in a hundred adults in prison, more than any other country in the world (see "Incarceration in the United States " in Wikipedia). 70% of those incarcerated are non-white. As my youngest son said wonderingly and appreciatively to me recently about the situation from which he has emerged over the past few years, "Most people don't come back from there." Instead, they often lash out at the world around them in aimless but partly understandable fury.

I attended First UU Church of Toledo on the Sunday after Brundage's death, and when I was leaving I stowed my name tag up on the board near the entrance. On the line above it, about an inch away, I saw the name tag of Robert Brundage; probably I had subconsciously noted that name on one of my visits earlier. His religious affiliation was not mentioned in the July 8 Toledo Blade article about him which I have drawn on above, although the names of a First Church UU couple active in interfaith and civic affairs, quoted in the article as friends of Brundage, would lead to that connection. Most probably I had seen him at church and stored that image. He was a friend of First Church, and he was also a friend of the rest of the world.

Life is good.

I've been really caught up in the politics stuff I've been writing recently and haven't written anything about life in general. So here goes.

I'm in one of those periods of contentment that always makes me worry that the other shoe is about to drop. Little things could be improved about my life. I need to get more billable hours, spend more time in front of the WiiFit, go visit Linguistfriend and get a little more one-on-one time with my husband, but on the whole, things are good.

I'm a total nerd for this but I love tax law. It's just so delightfully straightforward. All the laws can be conveniently examined. The cases make sense. It's great! I sometimes have trouble remembering that most people don't love tax law, and y'all were only barely spared a post on Sarah Palin's commuting in light of the Flowers case.

I don't love corporations. But I feel like I should understand them, so I'm taking the class.

ZombieKid was joining the school band this year and was thinking about playing the clarinet or flute. As far as I can tell a skinny boy carrying a clarinet or flute around junior high might as well be wearing a sign that says "Please kick my ass," so I was delighted when he ended up going with the saxaphone.

Due to the questionable influence of Jana-who-creates and Joe-the-Math-guy, I started reading comic books this summer. I'm mostly through Preacher's trade paperbacks now, though the last few are on order and am about to start Fables. I read V for Vendetta but failed to see what the fuss was all about. I had read Sandman in college and much preferred it. I've got Watchmen sitting on my shelf awaiting my attention. Edie-who-sells-books also sells comic books and has been delighted by this turn of events because she knows how fast I read.

Also, at the suggestion of Katy-the-Wise, this summer I started reading Harry Kemelman's detective series about Rabbi David Small. I really like it and look forward to finishing it. I've had some nice conversations with Katy-the-Wise recently. I am constantly amazed at the number of smart and awesome friends I have.

Jana-who-Creates is in charge of making sure I don't turn evil. (I know, I know, she's behind.) and ZombieKid is in charge of making sure I remain fun. It disturbed Jana that she went on two retreats with me in two weeks and I only brought homework to read. So I'm trying to keep things in balance.

YRUU starts again tomorrow. We have a ton of new yutes and I look forward to getting to know them, though I seriously miss some of the ones who went to college this year. I'm writing the script for the Murder Mystery Dinner again.

Oh, and I'M GOING TO SEE SANDRA BERNHARD tonight with Jana-who-Creates!

So that's me.

What's up with you?

CC

Linguist Friend: EMINENT VICTORIANS

In the July 29 issue of Christian Century, Carol Zaleski of Smith College, under the title "Eminent Victorians" (borrowed from Lytton Strachey) turns from the tiresome recent attacks on religion by modern atheists to the vigorous and spirited discussions of the Victorian period, exemplified by the mathematician W.K.Clifford (1845-1879), the clergyman and geologist/naturalist William Buckland (1784-1856), Buckland's student Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (1805-1873, well trained in mathematics), and the biologist T.H.Huxley (1825-1895).

The famous debate about evolution between the latter two took place at the meeting of the Oxford Meeting of the British Association on Saturday, June 30, 1860. Zaleski quotes Wilberforce's peroration to an unqualified critique of evolution addressed to Huxley as "Is it on your grandfather's or your grandmother's side that you claim descent from an ape?" This version of the question does not quite agree with the phrasing which is given in T.H. Huxley's "Life and Letters" (by Huxley's son Leonard Huxley) and the "Life and Letters" of Charles Darwin by his son Francis Darwin, but the main point is clear and well supported by contemporary witnesses.

Zaleski's version of Huxley's response tells what he denied saying but not what he did say. She writes "Huxley denies having replied that he would rather be an ape than a bishop", which appears to come from Huxley's letter of Sept. 9, 1860, written to correct widely disseminated inaccurate versions of his response. An example is that of the "Guardian" newspaper as cited in Adrian Desmond's biography of T.H.Huxley (1994, p.680), about the sad day "when Professors lose their tempers and solemnly avow they would rather be descended from apes than Bishops".

The version of Huxley's response which was considered most accurate by T.H. Huxley and his son Leonard is found in a contemporary letter by the student John Richard Green, who was present at the debate:
"I asserted - and I repeat – that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling it would rather be a man – a man of restless and versatile intellect – who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions and skilled appeals to religious prejudice."

A reporter from MacMillan's Magazine who was also present and reported on the meeting wrote to Leonard Huxley that "I cannot quite accept Mr. J.R. Green's sentences as your father's, though I didn't doubt that they convey the sense." The word "equivocal" is certainly not authentic. The reporter for Macmillan's Magazine summarized Huxley's response as "He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth." A third account by the Oxford chemist A.G.Vernon-Harcourt, quoted by Leonard Huxley, confirms this general content, as does that by W.H.Freemantle published in his biography of Darwin. T.H.Huxley wrote to Francis Darwin on June 27, 1891 that "I should say that Freemantle's account is substantially correct, but that Green has the substance of my speech more accurately."

What was the point here? One point was the correctness of Darwin's version of evolutionary doctrine, which was well supported although it conflicted with the contemporary interpretation of Genesis. Another was Huxley's anger at the scientific amateurism exemplified by Wilberforce, an able man of conservative views and administrative talent who in fact did have great ability and educational advantages. One of the life-objectives of T.H.Huxley, who was largely self-educated, was to make science a possible profession in England at a time when learned and scientific activity was on the whole an amateur enterprise. On this occasion, the issue of professionalism was probably much more significant than any conflict of religion with science; such a conflict is not even alluded to in Huxley's response. On the other hand, Huxley was opposed to the Victorian church as an institution, as Desmond (1994) makes clear.

Another reason that we should not picture this debate as essentially a conflict between science and religion is that by no means all Victorian churchmen refused to accept evolution. As an outstanding case, F.J.A.Hort (1828-1892), the greatest British scholar of the text of the Greek New Testament, was also well trained scientifically; he took a First Class in the Natural Science final honors examination at Cambridge University in 1851, and later served as one of the examiners. Hort was an immediate admirer of the "Origin of Species", about which he wrote to his collaborator Westcott in early 1860 that "In spite of difficulties, I am inclined to think it unanswerable." Hort's modern biographer Graham Patrick (1988) provides a valuable discussion of how in his posthumous book "The Way the Truth the Life" (1893) Hort treats of the relations of science and religion, partly in the text and partly in appended notes. Hort writes "It is not too much to say that the Gospel itself can never be fully known till nature as well as man is fully known; and that the manifestation of nature as well as man in Christ is part of His manifestation of God." (p.83 in my 1894 copy). Some aspects of Hort's religious views I cannot share, but for many years I have had profound respect for him as someone who combined deep scholarly and scientific awareness.

Carol Zaleski is certainly right that the Victorians raised vigorous and interesting arguments

LinguistFriend: TRADITION, MOBY DICK, AND THE DODO

After my former wife and I were married, she was surprised to find out that I talked in my sleep in Russian, a language which in some respects I know much better than my native English. (The fact that she found that out only after we married is of course an indicator of how long ago that was.) I owed this speaking ability mainly to two women who supplemented my college classroom language instruction by teaching me how to actually speak the language.

I connected with one of them, Shulamith Schneider, through our family physician and friend Dr. Irving Berlin. She was one of his aunts, a native of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and the daughter of a learned rabbi who was himself a distinguished scholar of languages and of religious and classical texts. His name can be found in major Jewish reference books, with the fact that he was killed by the Nazis in 1941. It was partly this personal background that inclined her to help me with my spoken Russian when I was at home in southeast Virginia, where she had made a life and a career as a pharmacist after leaving Lithuania. To many of the poor people who bought from her, she was known as “the little doctor”. She was indeed short, and in that time and place, I do not doubt that she was the closest thing to a medical contact that many of them had.

When I was at home in Hampton during my college years, she and I would sit out on the back porch of her modest home on occasional evenings, listening to the mosquitoes and reading through and discussing classical Russian poetry and prose. In return, I was able to expand her library of Russian books somewhat, the closest to any payment that she would accept. Her Russian, although dated, was excellent, so good that in high school she had acted as a tutor in Russian to the daughter of a Russian general, a young woman who like many prerevolutionary nobles had been brought up with French as her primary language, but with a change of times needed to improve her Russian. It is a fundamental aspect of Judaism to emphasize the role of the individual in community, and in America, Ms. Schneider had made a place for herself by her professional skills and the way in which she used them. As the little doctor, she won the acceptance and trust of an impoverished clientele. But with such a clientele, violence is rarely distant; her brother Moses, who had come to America with her, was at one point the object of an attack so violent that I can still remember the lines of knife scars on his face. After he died, and I married so that I came to Virginia less often, I would still visit her, but eventually she told my wife and me in her now subdued Russian: “It is good that you are visiting me now. The next time you come, you will not find me alive.”

The other Russian woman from whom I learned to speak Russian was a member of the university language staff, who ran regular conversation lessons with material supplied by the Slavic Department. Her own education, although not academic, was also excellent, but it was the education of a Russian noblewoman, which she was, the Countess Nina Georg’evna Murav’yova. When I came to know her well, I learned that she shared an apartment half way between Harvard and MIT with an elderly Russian economic geographer, Taras Vasil’evich Butoff. A series of graduate students in Slavic languages sublet rooms in the apartment, one of whom I was during the summer after I graduated from college, before I married.


Nina Georg’evna had a sharp mind and an acerbic tongue, but she had difficulty in adapting to life in America. Her English was limited, and in her large bedroom she slept under a beautiful overhanging canopy, one of her remnants of former wealth. Like many Russians of an older generation, she knew much classical Russian poetry by heart. But the world in which she lived was foreign to her. To learn to drive an automobile was an unimaginable achievement to her. As a noble, she had been brought up to be above the crowd, not to learn to serve them as did Ms. Schneider. But other people made possible her occasional indispensable interactions with the official world, like the young Boston attorney who joined our conversation classes informally and fought off various Massachusetts authorities for her gratis when it was necessary. When, having read through and tired of all the Russian and French literature that appealed to her, she decided that she needed to read “Moby Dick”, it was up to me to find and buy for her a Russian translation of it, which eventually I was able to do. Still, even within the large upper floor of the apartment house on Hancock St. where she had her residence, much of the time she lived basically in isolation. When she had the stroke that killed her, she lay undiscovered for some time in her bedroom before her apartment mates finally broke into her bedroom when she did not respond to calls and knocks.

On rereading these sketches, I grow terrified that as I grow older, I approximate to Nina Georg’evna’s inability (suicidal in the long run) to adapt to changes in my place and world.. But I see the same effect even more strongly in the area of religion. I see the same pattern of inability or refusal to adapt in various ongoing conflicts in religion, with the resulting damage magnified by efforts to capitalize on them for political and career purposes. Those who adapt to a changing world are therefore deemed guilty of heresy; those who refuse to adapt are the virtuous orthodox, who perhaps have never suspected that the fate of the dodo might be relevant to theology. To add a note, when friends and family cleared out Nina Georg’evna’s effects, they found the Russian translation of “Moby Dick” that I had given her, and they had no idea what to make of it, it was so uncharacteristic of her to branch into a new area of thought. Actually, she had read it and was impressed, I can say from personal knowledge. Perhaps there is always a glimmer of the possibility of opening up to new ways of thought, but the present and prospective damage from such ongoing disputes is overwhelming.

World shrinks a tad

9:21: CC gets an email from the office administrator at her firm who has e-mailed the entire firm to ask if anybody knows somebody who speaks Ukranian.

9:23: CC emails LinguistFriend.

9:33: CC emails office manager, saying "I know someone who probably speaks Ukranian. Lemme check"

9:35: CC calls LinguistFriend at home. LF says his Ukranian speech isn't that great, though he can read it when he has to. CC says "Ok" and rings off.

9:37: LinguistFriend calls CC back to point out that every Ukranian LF has ever met is bilingual in Russian*. CC thanks LF, rings off again.

9:41: CC calls office manager, explains about the Russian. Office manager says she has just heard from another attorney who used to work with a guy who speaks Ukranian. She thanks CC, but says she will probably go with the other translator, who is an attorney.

An email to a medium-sized law firm yields two Ukranian translators in twenty minutes.

I heart globalization.

CC

*Russian is LF's favorite language. LF is AWESOME in Russian.

LINGUISTFRIEND ON BIRDS, BEASTS, AND FRIENDS

I spent most of yesterday on rereading a Ph.D. dissertation in German on the acoustic communication of chinchillas, and then spent time in the afternoon with a colleague and a student of his who is starting to work in this area and needed access to the results of the dissertation. I was going through with her, for instance, the acoustic description of what happens when mother chinchilla comes home to her brood after foraging for food, and gives the position call which indicates “Here I am!”, which is followed by the babies’ uttering another call which means ”Suckle!”, immediately getting down to business. The dry descriptions of the behavioral context of these acoustic productions have inescapable charm, although they are completely factual. Since all mammals have roughly the same numbers of heartbeats and breaths during a healthy lifetime, the lives of these small Andean rodents presumably have the same subjective length as our own; although chronologically their lives are shorter, their hearts and respiration function proportionately more rapidly than ours. That is part of the phenomenon called physiological time, an application of biological scaling which is sometimes used in order to generalize scientific findings across species.

During a break in my work with the student, I checked my e-mail and found a message forwarded by my former wife, a note from her college roommate describing the ongoing last days of the life of her husband of forty years, to whom she was introduced by my mother, who had an uncanny and embarrassing knack for such things. He is a fine man, a logician who somehow found a place for himself in aeronautical research, and produced an able son with his new wife in addition to the two beautiful daughters whom his departed wife had left to his care. Their long life together was happy, and they were the only mutual friends of my former wife and myself who maintained positive interactions with both of us after the divorce, for which I was deeply grateful. His present situation is such that I was reminded of Ms. Kitty’s recent discussion of theodicy, the issue of how an all-powerful and just God could allow such things to happen (I am not claiming that he does).Yes, the Job problem, and many others, of course. I do not weep often, but I wept last night.

Earlier this fall, I came across an old Loeb edition of the major Latin works of the Anglo-Saxon historian Bede (about 673-735 AD) in a Toledo bookstore, and since then I have browsed in it. Last night I was reminded of a passage in his treatise on the early history of the English church, which I found after a little searching. In it, Bede describes how the Saxon King Edwin of Northumbria consulted with his advisors and chief pagan priest to decide whether his kingdom should convert to Christianity, as urged by the Christian bishop Paulinus (d. 644). The events described took place about 627 AD or a little before. I have revised the published translation of the comment of one advisor of Edwin on the basis of the Latin text:


“King, for the comparison of our uncertain time to live, the present life of men on earth seems to me such, as if while you were sitting at table with your captains and thanes, in the winter time, for instance while the fire had been lit in the middle and the dining room being made warm, but outside everywhere there were raging storms of winter rains or snows, and one of the sparrows entered the house and flew through very rapidly, which when it entered at one doorway, it soon exited through another one. Which only during the time that it is inside, it is not touched by the storm of winter, but however once the brief time of good weather has passed in a moment, soon from winter it returns to winter, and escapes your eyes. Thus the life of men appears briefly; but of what will follow, or of what has gone before, we do not know at all. Wherefore if this new doctrine has brought us something more certain, it seems worthy to be followed.“

Of course, neither do I know any answer to this question, but I do know that we must value the birds, and beasts, and friends that we have, at Christmas and at other times. Have a good holiday season.

Linguist Friend: BISHOP SPONG AND PSEUDO-EPIPHANIUS

On the weekend of Dec.1-2, Bishop John Shelby Spong, retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, New Jersey, visited the First Unitarian Church of Toledo, Ohio. His visit convinced me that I shall have to become better acquainted with his work. My comments here are mainly based on eight pages of notes from his two Saturday lectures, with following question and answer sessions, and his Sunday sermon. Quotations are given verbatim from my notes, except for a change of one verb form. I estimate that First Church members constituted perhaps 100 of about 250 attenders at these events, indicating that Spong’s talks aroused wide community interest.
SATURDAY MORNING LECTURE
Spong’s talks took as background his recent book “Jesus for the Non-Religious”. His Saturday morning lecture focussed on the Bible, addressing an aspect in which many modern churches follow the Reformation, the exaggerated reliance on the Bible (sola scriptura) as authority, treated in a way which ignores the past two hundred years of critical and historical scholarship, and thus failing to interpret the Bible in terms of the places and times of origin of its various sections. The Bible has been terribly misused, he feels; it is based on many assumptions which we can no longer share, and cannot be the ultimate source of religious authority, he stated. As a reaction to a different source of authority, he referred to the concept of the “gap-filler God”, the notion that religion is relevant mainly to areas of scientific ignorance.
Spong recalled the Genesis creation-legend of Adam and Eve, and how the story of their disobedience had been transformed into a view of perpetual human guilt, original sin. Since the recognition by Darwin of human evolution, this interpretation of the creation-legend must be abandoned. Your “humanity is not enhanced by making you feel guilty,” he stated. The question then arises, “Can we retell the Jesus story in terms of modern knowledge?” If not, it is the death of Christianity, he felt.
In the question period, I posed a question in which I recalled Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s response to the “gap-filler” concept. He wrote in a 1944 letter from prison that “We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know”, with further clarification that by this he implied the need to base religion on scientific knowledge as well as addressing specific human issues such as death, suffering and guilt. In his response, Spong elaborated about the person and situation of Bonhoeffer for the mostly lay audience, and the significance of his declaration quoted above. Spong himself was comfortable in his agreement with Bonhoeffer’s view.
SATURDAY AFTERNOON LECTURE
In his Saturday afternoon talk, Spong pointed out that the beginning of the misuse of biblical traditions was not recent, taking as an example Paul’s distortion of the creation story of Genesis in his version of the concept of original sin. Spong was concerned as to just how religion is to be combined with science, and whether difficulty in doing so means that the age of religion has passed. Participation in organized religion has declined drastically in Europe, and the United States is anomalous in the Western world in terms of the importance given to religion in public life. What is the significance now of the religion which stems from the Jesus traditions, in a world in which background assumptions have changed greatly, he asked. Church life is seen by him as a complex in which first-century Jewish traditions about Jesus are combined with a liturgy which comes from the medieval Western world.
For Paul, he said, God was in Christ. But what did the term “God” mean at different times, and what is the significance of the liturgy meant to placate him? How much risk of not placating God are you exposed to if you change that liturgy? The tribal mentality in parts of the Bible in terms of which “God favors my guys” in opposition to other groups who have their own gods, is quite current in the modern world. With the emergence of monotheism, God is seen differently. Theism he sees as a human creation, but this very fact points out the possibility of a non-theistic alternative.
In turning to the traditions of the NT, Spong pointed out the coexistence of multiple different concepts of Jesus’s divine character (christology), partly incompatible, in the writings of the evangelists and Paul. For Jesus to be the personalization of God was different from the notion that he was the Christ or Messiah, anointed to be king of the Jews (a dangerous political claim under the Roman empire). The comparisons of him to Moses and Elijah bring in yet other elements. In an extension of this christological discussion, Spong injected deep personal interpretations of the relation of divinity to humanity, saying that “Humanity and divinity are not distinct categories. Divinity is a description of what human nature can be when it is fully human.” If these views are accepted, he felt, there must be new answers to the question of what it means to be a Christian in the twenty-first century.
Rather than asking whether the gospel stories really happened, Spong recommends that we should ask, for instance, why did the authors construct their stories thus to make Jesus the fulfillment of the Messiah stories? It may be unclear how he reconciles this with his membership in the Jesus Seminar, a group which in part of its work has aimed at the assessment of the historical value of the surviving traditions about Jesus. Both directions of inquiry have their value. On the other hand, he refused to be drawn into detailed discussion of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, stating “I’m not into certainty. I think Christianity is not into certainty.”
Responding to questions after his Saturday afternoon lecture, at times Spong was pessimistic about church organizations, stating in response to one question as to whether he saw successors coming in his direction of progessive Christianity, “I don’t expect the Church ever to be Christian. If you expect the Church to be Christian, you’ll be disappointed.” Later he elaborated in a more positive way about how he conceived the tasks of the church. “The job of the Christian church is to transform the world. . .” and to “help people become more human, and not to help them become religious.” He has mixed responses to those who have recently revived the 18th century Enlightenment attack on Christianity, among whom he likes Richard Dawkins.
SUNDAY MORNING SERMON
In his sermon on the second morning of his visit, Spong acknowledged the coming of Christmas by discussing the birth of Jesus. This is treated only in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, not in the basic one of Mark. The divergent treatments in Matthew and Luke agree mainly in showing that by the time of their writing, Jesus’s paternity was an issue which had to be addressed. Spong, who is an advocate of women, handled this in the case of Matthew by considering the summary of Jesus’s genealogy in the first chapter, commonly considered the most boring passage in the Bible. Spong elucidated the significance of the four women before Mary referred to in Jesus’s genealogy: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. He pointed out the late and secondary character of the story of the virgin birth, stating that it apparently was not known to Paul. By the time of the gospel of John, the issue could be ignored.; John’s focus was on christology. Overall, Spong drew from the genealogy of Jesus in Matt. 1:1-17, not christological conclusions, but that “the love of God is sufficient to overcome any human frailties”. On a level of meta-interpretation, Spong’s sermon illustrated the significant conclusions to which one may be led by consideration of an apparently barren text on a critical and historical-literary basis, as suggested in his introductory considerations on the Bible.
POSTLUDE
At the beginning of his Sunday sermon, Spong had commented with amusement on the difficulty of finding a Bible in a Unitarian-Universalist church as he was preparing for his talk; he had to settle for the King James Version. When he caught sight of me at the lunch which followed his Sunday sermon, and came over to shake hands, I jokingly told him that he had asked the wrong person for a Bible, showing him the pocket Greek NT in which I had followed his discussion of Matthew. He seemed surprised but appreciative.
Before the sermon, I had awoken in the morning to the faint powder of snow that had fallen during the night, hearing echoes in my mind that I finally recognized as coming from a sermon by an unknown medieval Byzantine churchman whose work is wrongly attributed to Epiphanius (circa 315-403 AD), the Bishop of Constantia. I first encountered this work, which is both rhetorically skilled and learned, several decades ago when I was reading through all of the earliest Old Bulgarian texts (originally from the 9th and 10th centuries AD) and their Greek originals, which was an education in Greek Christian literature and thought. I was stunned when I came to the line in this sermon which reads: “I have taken up a pen, that I may sign freedom for the human race.” The sense of this text cannot correspond to a modern political interpretation. Instead, its context comes from Colossians 2:14, looking back to Paul’s view of the abandonment of Mosaic law as liberation, in Galatians and elsewhere. In the thinking of the sermon’s unknown author (called pseudo-Epiphanius), as in Paul’s view, it referred not to a political event but to a shift away from a broad theological point of view which they regarded as imprisoning the human mind and life.
Spong acknowledged that on various occasions he had been invited to join the UU movement, but he had declined to do so. He emphasized the long-term continuity of the Western Church, saying that “Episcopalians are Catholics who can’t speak Latin”. Like the scholar Erasmus (1469(?) - 1536 AD), who saw clearly the defects of the Catholic church of his time, but did not accept invitations to leave it to join the Reformation, Spong prefers to work from within, saying “You can’t change your church from the outside.” Further, he stated that “Any Christian tradition that believes it can no longer be challenged has already died”; some of his Episcopalian colleagues counter by declaring him heretical.
One member of First Church asked me at Sunday lunch whether my admiration of Spong meant that I had reached the same religious conclusions that he had. I cannot do so in a general way, because of many other issues that he did not address. If I did, then I would have to become an Anglican. I will learn more about some of Spong’s views by informing myself better about his publications. There may well be important limitations to his point of view. However, Bishop Spong probably has enough to deal with in his own role as a contributor to and advocate of progressive Christian thought. He has, after all, taken up his pen to sign freedom for the human race, not as part of the differentiation of Christianity from Judaism, but as part of a major further advance of Christanity beyond its traditional character, and that is enough of a task for anyone.

LinguistFriend: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INDEPENDENT AFFILIATES

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE INDEPENDENT AFFILIATES

Recent UUA Board actions in regard to the independent affiliates of the UUA were a lively topic of informal discussion at the 2007 GA in Portland. Information from several sources is summarized here, including especially the Board activity reported in the UUA Annual Reports 2007 and www.uuworld.org reports. This topic will be revisited by the UUA Board at its October 2007 meeting.

A “Congregations Come First “ initiative proposed by a team under moderator Gini Courter aims “to explore ways to remove organizational obstacles to congregational health and vitality”. One of these obstacles was considered to be “that our congregations are not served by Independent Affiliates operating in isolation or being an alternative for congregational life” (both quotes are from Annual Reports 2007, pp.2-3), so they are all forced to reapply for their status. The letter which was sent announcing this move to the leadership of the Independent Affiliates of the UUA by Paul Rickter as UUA secretary can be found at http://www.uua.org/aboutus/governance/boardtrustees/letters/26969.shtml ; it makes clear that from the first the intent was to withhold independent affiliate status from many of the existing organizations. After the decision that Independent Affiliates must reapply for that status, the Board discussed conversations with organizations which wish to (re-)affiliate with the UUA.

The significance of the Independent Affiliates controversy is not obvious at first. To portray their role schematically, let us consider the external organization of the UUA as a vertical branching diagram, in which branching takes place from a node at the top of the diagram, representing 25 Beacon St. The first branching is from the central office to the districts. The second branching under each district divides it into congregations (in most places the significance of cluster organization is so limited that clusters are ignored here). Under each congregation there is a final branching for individuals. The main information flow is vertical; in fact, it is mainly downward, with much less information going from congregations to the districts and the central office than comes downward from the central office. In some senses, of course, since congregational decisions depend on available information, such information flow is closely related to control relations.

Many UU congregations function in isolation, and the involvement of most members does not go past the immediate congregation. On the other hand, for those members whose interests pertain e.g to a particular area of religion, religious philosophy, international activity or association, we can picture a second sort of connection which may be considered as horizontal. These members often are vitalized by connections to others, mostly inside but also outside the UUA, on such special topics as humanism, Christianity, Jewish heritage, Buddhism, etc. About sixty such horizontal connections exist in practice. These topics are served by what from the UUA central office point of view are known as the Independent Affiliates. Although they are not all of equal interest to everyone, they provide an important part of the theological richness and ideological diversity of modern Unitarian Universalism. They offer an affiliation between individuals which is distinct from and not controlled by the vertical central stem of information flow.

For an example of the role of the Independent Affiliates, let me take the case
of a liberal Christian who finds himself in a UU congregation in which there is little interest in that orientation. (For clarity, the present writer has never been a member of a Christian church, but speaks rather from his observations of membership patterns.) That person, cast entirely on his own resources and those of a minister if there is one, can either shift to another UU congregation which is more oriented to Judeo-Christian tradition, search with little guidance for external connections, or remain frustrated and isolated from the sort of liberal religious connections which he has probably already left a Christian congregation to search for. The existence of the Unitarian Universalist Christian Fellowship provides connections, publications, specific UUCF events at GA and elsewhere, internet connections to discussion groups and blogs, connections to UU Christian ministers, etc. The possibility of such a diverse religious and ideological network across congregations, now under attack, has been a strength of modern UUism.

Unitarian congregations have offered the community aspects of the connections inherent in the maintenance of a congregation and its activities, which might be seen as local horizontal connections, and the input of local ministers can leaven local resources by pointing members towards UUA and external resources. The more distant horizontal connections have provided religious and intellectual associations of a richness and variety which only the largest local congregations can provide. This sort of multiple connectedness is one of the more attractive aspects of UUism, in contrast to hierarchical religious groups in which the flow of decisions and doctrines is exclusively vertical and downwards. Where the more distant connections are weakened or even abolished, the religious, intellectual, and ideological connections that draw thoughtful people into association are weakened. Such weakening of the horizontal connections approximates the UUA system to a vertical hierarchical one which most members have already rejected in their decision to join a Unitarian-Univeralist congregation.

. The decision of the Board of Trustees that each of the independent affiliates loses its status and must apply for reaccreditation is not pro forma. Until renewed recognition is acquired, none of these organization is recognized by the UUA as an affiliate organization. However, those organizations already enrolled in a UUA benefit program remain enrolled through December 2008. Only two out of the seventeen applicants which had requested independent affiliate status at the April 20-22 Board meeting in Boston were granted such status, the Council of Unitarian Universalist Camps and Conferences, and the Unitarian Universalist Urban Ministry (see Jane Greer’s article in http://www.uuworld.org/news/articles/23524.shtml for May 7, 2007). On June 25, two more independent affiliates were granted affiliate status. These were DRUMM (Diverse and Revolutionary Unitarian Universalist Multicultural Ministries), and Universalist Convocations, a consortium of Universalist conventions. Associate status was granted to the UU Women’s Federation, the UU Service Committee, and the UU United Nations Office. The applications of the Partner Church Council, the UU Ministry to Earth, and the UU Small Group Ministry Network were tabled for consideration in October.

It is striking that not a single organization which focusses on religious or ideological aspects of UUism has been approved. Tom Stites notes in his report of the present status of this decision that these organizations thus lose the ability to arrange GA workshops, to gain recognition by listings in the UUA directory, and to have discounts for advertising in the UU World, as well as other benefits. See his report at http://uuworld.org/news/articles/31344.shtml A summary of these events is provided by T.S. in the fall 2007 UUWorld at p.53.

This action of the UUA threatens to weaken the independent intellectual streams in modern UUism. Some of the formerly affiliated organizations will adapt, others may die. For anyone who is not comfortable with my presentation of this conclusion, many of the above arguments, and other related ones, have been developed in a different way in a series of blog-posts by a Massachusetts minister (LT) at the address http://www.thelivelytradition.blogspot.com, in the posts with the titles (in reverse chronological order, as is usual on blogs) “One Meaning of the Independent Affiliate mystery” on June 7, “Serving Congregations?”, “It does not follow”, “More on the IA Mystery - Going a Little Deeper”, “Why the Independent Affiliate Mystery matters”, and “The Independent Affiliate Mystery”, which includes a list of the rejected organizations as of that date, and the form which organizations had to return in reapplying for independent affiliate status. On July 5, LT posted two later comments stating one hypothesis about the target in these proceedings, which indeed was suggested in private discussion at GA.

As stated in the preceding summary of Board activity, the Board’s actions have been rationalized on the ground that they will better serve congregations. This is a specious argument, as has been well argued by The Lively Tradition’s posts. Actually, the opposite is true, since the Board’s actions will make it more difficult for congregations to receive input from religiously diverse UU sources. At the present time, a weakness of the independent affiliates is that they are not well known to those who do not attend GA, so that they do not develop as extensive participation as they potentially could have. The independent affiliates are capable of providing a much richer leavening of religious diversity and information to UU congregations than has in general been available. For this reason, the existence and activity of especially the religious units among the independent affiliates should be made better known to congregations, rather than weakening their connections to the UUA.

LinguistFriend: THE OTHER CC AND THE UUA

When I was invited to be on the board of a liberal Protestant campus ministry several years ago, I found that the two magazines most often referred to by my fellow board members were Sojourners and The Christian Century (the other CC), and I subscribed to them in order to understand better the frame of reference of my Christian board colleagues. Even after leaving that board, I have continued these journals, since I am generally sympathetic with their values
and usually find The Christian Century in particular to be a useful and well balanced source on events in the progressive Christian world.

I was dismayed to find in the News section of the current (July 24) issue of the other CC a post-Portland article under the title “Racial, multicultural tensions still beset Unitarian Universalists”, from the RNS news service. It is not possible to review it in detail, but I think that it is reasonable to say that the article puts a somewhat negative spin on a number of discussions of racial issues within the UUA, and at recent GAs. Probably the best-balanced statement cited was that of UU minister Manish Mishra, who was paraphrased as saying that “the church and its leadership are sometimes unfairly blamed for issues that affect “all of white liberal America.”“

Racism is, of course, a world-wide problem, not just an American problem, not just a liberal political or religious problem, not just a UU problem. Since I grew up in a liberal white family in an openly racist part of this country, since my father taught in a historically black college, and since my former wife and I raised an adopted black child from the age of two months, I have some awareness of this problem and I have a personal investment in racial issues. Those are the assumptions that my adopted black son invoked when he called on Father’s Day this year and thanked me for saving his life (his words) through my support of him during a hard passage in his life in recent years.

Most persons of color are better qualified by experience to speak on these issues than I am, so I usually leave statements on them to others. However, there is a higher-order issue in terms of the place of issues of race within the UUA that needs to be addressed. Although the UUA can (and I believe that it should) act and exert influence on various levels to ameliorate racial problems, a political /social topic such as race is not and cannot be the primary focus of a religious organization such as the UUA. President Sinkford has made the issue of racism a more active issue at the UUA. Sinkford, probably more than anyone else, can make this a productive discussion, but to do so he must aim at specific concrete goals and situate the discussion of these issues appropriately within the primary religious mission of the UUA

Linguist Friend responds to Ms. Kitty's Meme

LINGUISTFRIEND TRIES TO SAVE HIS SOUL:
I understand from Ms. Kitty’s meme-assignment that I can save my soul if I write about eight defining moments in my life at which I might have lost my soul (on some points the jury is still out), or at least I learned something from the experience.

1. In the early and mid-20th century, American aeronautical engineering benefited from the immigration of German and other Central European applied scientists. When I was in the 3rd grade, the younger son of one of them was in the same class as I was. Richard (now a military historian) gave me academic competition such that I realized that whereas earlier I had done well enough, now I had to do better than I had known I could, which was a good habit to establish early.

2. In the same period, I was introduced to the elements of music theory and piano. I quit when I realized that I would never be a good pianist. I repeated this sequence with the recorder, the classical guitar, and singing. I learned a lot about music theory, and my father made sure that I learned about musical acoustics. But eventually I realized something: never let yourself or other people nudge you to do something because you or they think you should do it. Do what is fun and you are really good at, especially if other people are not good at it.

3. In my second year of college, I took an introductory course on linguistics from a great scholar on the history of languages. But, by that time, the historical approach he practiced no longer set the model of research in his field; it had been partly replaced by models drawn from mathematics. He himself had once had to choose whether he would accept a university scholarship in math or in linguistic studies, and had chosen the latter, which he now regretted. So, in late middle age, he tried to renew his mathematical studies, which of course led him nowhere; when he retired three years later in ill health and depression, he did not live long. One has only one life, and it needs some basic continuity and consistency.

4.. Early in college, I asked our family physician to refer me to one of his East European relatives to help me to improve my spoken Russian. He introduced me to his pharmacist aunt Shalumith Schneider, the daughter of a scholarly Vilna rabbi. She gave me years of friendship and tutorial in Russian language and literature. Since her native city was a great center of Jewish scholarship (the Vilna Gaon, the Vilna edition of the Talmud), she also gave me an implicit orientation in terms of her recognition of and devotion to the value of learning.

5. When I married at age 22, it was to someone who initially seemed well matched, an agnostic (read: no interest in religion) daughter of an American diplomatic family. Thirty-one years later, she moved back across the country from LA to her native Maine, and a year after that she filed for divorce. She had borne our children, typed my doctoral dissertation, and developed a private practice in counseling in an LA suburb. But the marriage had progressively turned emotionally sterile, starting halfway through. At times I say that I have never seen a bad divorce, on the principle that once either one of the parties has left in some sense, then the sooner the legal action is finished, the sooner both parties can get on with life. But divorce may bring terrible practical situations, including the freedom to commit appalling stupidities.

6. When I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I focussed on the grammar of an ancient language that was fundamental in East European studies. Since almost all of its early manuscripts were texts translated from Greek Christian sources, to write my dissertation I had to read thousands of pages of late Greek texts. This was effectively a total immersion course in Eastern Christianity. Although this material has never been central to how I earn my living, I have never entirely left it, and it has been a perennial background factor in how I think about the world and religion. Immersion leads to absorption.

7. When the Cold War and East European studies cooled, I shifted my orientation to the basic study of speech on a physiological level. This entailed learning much more physically-oriented biology and lab electronics, joining the 20th century after being (figuratively) educated in the 19th. This was a process of reacculturation so complete that my main research colleagues have been in medically- and engineering-related fields, and I belatedly came to understand the engineering research people who were around me in my childhood. But it cost time, money, and some of the personal input that my children should have had.

8. In my early teenage years, my parents helped start a small Unitarian fellowship in a tiny retired synagogue. I had no idea what they believed; my own religious ideas at that point mainly came from Julian Huxley. My Unitarian connection was weak when I went to college. Later, my devotion during free time was mainly to my family. It was not until the late 1980s that I really reconnected with UUism. That it did not attract my wife was not surprising, but I was grateful that the congregation was there when she left in late 1994, and the local UU congregation wherever I am has continued to be an important focus since then.

On some levels, my later years have made it possible for me to tie some things together better. I have lectured in Russia (in Russian) about my work on laryngeal physiology. My studies of Christian and Jewish sources give me a broader perspective on UUism, complementing the humanist perspective that I inherited from my father. Friends such as CC and Ms. Kitty have made me more aware of the importance of (different) aspects of progressive Christianity. At times I am still aware of the deeply destabilizing effects in myself of divorce after a long marriage, but I have survived so far, although I am entering the high-upkeep years of the human organism. An older physicist friend, once a student of Dirac and the younger Bragg, sent me a birthday card for last year, writing: "Life is precarious; be prepared for surprises." Indeed!

LINGUISTFRIEND ON “AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM”

Every Saturday evening when I am not sick or out of town, I drive thirty miles up to Toledo and bring back from a restaurant there at closing-time a load of left-over bread and pastry which is divided between the local home for battered women and their children, and the liberal Protestant campus ministry, where the bread is a staple of student dinners. At the Toledo end, I usually deal with a petite bright-eyed brown-haired young woman named Stephanie who looks forward to being a professor of English literature some day. That is an unwise ambition, but I have never said so to her; she might make it work, and I have no wish to discourage her. Occasionally we chat about aspects of academic life; my philological qualifications are strong enough to intrigue her (she is happily married, I hasten to say). Once, after taking the evening’s gleanings out to my station wagon, I thanked her for her help, as I always do. She answered “I do it for the same reason that you do, for the greater glory of God.” Actually, I do it so that women and children whom life has betrayed will not be hungry, but I managed to acknowledge her statement somehow and went on my way.
“For the greater glory of God”, or in the original Latin “ad majorem Dei gloriam” is one of the fixed motifs of Western European religion. From Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations”, where the phrase is attributed to Pope Gregory XIII, I learn that the phrase appears in the Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), and it is somewhat better known as the motto of the Jesuits, founded in 1540. The Council of Trent was the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation, of which the Jesuits were an instrument. When a phrase appears in two sources so close together in time and place, there is no way to be certain what was its ultimate origin, although it can be seen to have been in the air.
Is there any ultimate difference in meaning between my view of my Saturday evening activity and hers? I doubt it very much. Her expression is more general, and refers to a broader class of acts; perhaps it would also include the rainbow, which also surely may be seen as one of the glorious gifts of God. Stephanie’s background is certainly Christian, and reflects one stream of a broader point of view in Judeo-Christian tradition. In my copy of the Babylonian Talmud, the discussion of the requirements of communal charity is joined to the treatment of the laws of partnership. That is, what is economic fairness in respect to two or a few partners is generalized to the whole community. This provides a different but important perspective.
I cannot attribute much importance to the series of recent books declaring the failure of religious concepts of God. Within my lifetime, they have been preceded by another series declaring the death of God. The concept is hardly new: in the eighteenth century, the advent of the scientific world view removed the need to call upon the hypothesis of a divinity to explain mechanical phenomena. From the other side of the abyss between religious and scientific world-views, Albert Einstein would talk of the laws of the universe as the workings of God, a metaphor which the physicist Paul Davies has taken up in a rewarding way in our own days (“The Mind of God”, 1992). This sort of metaphor is congenial to me. For the rest, when I was about seven years old, I realized that noone in a long robe was in view playing a harp when our DC-3 aircraft emerged above the clouds; that view of God has never had much hold on me, and its failure does not trouble me.
I belong to a UU congregation in which some 70% of the members were originally Catholic, and many of them are so bitterly reactive that they wish to hear nothing of organized religion. This is an obstacle both to the development of the congregation as an organization and to possibilities of constructive interaction between our congregation and other congregations whose members respond to the world in terms which are different theologically, but with little practical difference in action. The solutions to hunger, pain, disease, and ignorance rarely differ depending on the religion of those who suffer from them. Although I have never been a member of a Christian church or a Jewish synagogue, and I do not expect that I ever will be, neither do I feel that their core religious conceptions, so far as they are important in practice, obstruct constructive ecumenical interaction which embodies the values of our respective religions. On this generalized level, I do not hesitate to join my theistic colleagues and say “Heis theos, God is one”. This was not always possible, and is not always possible; even today, these same colleagues will not always reciprocate in attributing value to my religious views. It was not true for those who burnt Servetus, but in terms of our daily life today it has broad truth, and the expectation of reciprocity is my working assumption when I advocate or participate in ecumenical work.

LINGUISTFRIEND REFLECTS ON THE PASSING OF BRUCE METZGER

In December, Fausto and I had a vigorous and stimulating discussion of Luke’s 2:14 verse which comes up every Christmas, most often in the inaccurate but admirable form “Peace on earth, good will to men.” I suggested that if Fausto wanted to learn about the logical underpinnings of the correction of such Greek texts, there was no better work to turn to than Bruce Manning Metzger’s classic treatise on the textual criticism of the Greek New Testament, “The Text of the New Testament” (first published 1964; translated into German, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese), which actually discusses this very passage. This is a wonderful book for anyone who reads the NT in Greek, and has much value even for those who do not. I can recall very clearly when I came to a point in the mid 1960s at which I needed an orientation to its subject matter in the course of my doctoral work. I simply sat in the high-backed chair in a corner of my Newtonville (MA) living room and read the book through to the end, utterly absorbed. We can be grateful that this book has been updated with the assistance of Bart Ehrman (4th ed. 2005).

Recently I was saddened to learn of the death from respiratory failure on February 13th, 2007, at age 93, of Metzger, George L. Collord Professor emeritus of New Testament Language and Literature in Princeton Theological Seminary, who was one of the central figures of American religious scholarship. It is easy to misunderstand the significance of the phrase “religious scholarship”. Metzger was a type of historian, a historian of the Greek Christian texts; there is little that he wrote that could not have been subscribed to with equal conviction by any Christian, Jew, Unitarian, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, etc., who had the rare qualities of mind and depth of learning that distinguished Metzger. He was a man of deep Christian (Presbyterian) religious conviction, but he was also the sort of religious scholar for whom factual honesty and competence are primary. Of him it could have been said, as Richard Johnson said after the death of the great English legal and religious historian John Selden in 1654, “If learning could have kept a man alive, this our brother had not died.”

Metzger was born in Middletown, Pennsylvania, on Feb. 9, 1914; his parents were Anna and Maurice Metzger. He graduated from Lebanon Valley College in 1935, received a bachelor of theology degree from Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS) in 1938 and a master’s degree in theology in 1939, and an MA (1940) and his doctorate in classics from Princeton University in 1942, after being ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1939. He began his teaching at PTS in 1938, where he taught for 46 years until he retired in 1984.

The points at which his work is most likely be visible to the general reader are his participation in the committee work for the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (full text published in 1952), his work on the Old Testament apocrypha and apocalyptic literature, and his general editorship of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible, published in 1990. The NRSV revision’s work on elimination of archaisms and sexism of the biblical text is still debated. The NRSV has been issued in forms for Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Eastern Orthodox groups. Both the RSV and NRSV were published by Metzger as study bibles in Oxford University Press editions, in collaboration with Herbert May for the RSV and later with Roland Murphy for the NRSV. Metzger published later popular works of religious scholarship with Michael Coogan, of which the edited “The Oxford Companion to the Bible” (1993) is noteworthy. He oversaw the Reader’s Digest condensed Bible, published in 1982. Metzger’s work on Bible translation had its organizational aspect also: he was a trustee of the American Bible Society from 1948 until he became trustee emeritus in 1999.

One should not underestimate the extreme character of the reaction to the revised versions of the Bible. Metzger would show visitors to his PTS office an urn in which reposed the ashes of a copy of the RSV Bible, torched from the pulpit by one opponent of the revision, who then sent it to the chairman of the committee of revision. Metzger inherited the urn when he became chairman of the revisers’ committee for the NRSV in 1975, and commented to one visitor “I’m so glad to be a translator in the 20th century. They only burn Bibles now, not the translators!” Much uninformed hatred is still to be found in conservative Christian comments on Metzger’s work.

Those who read the NT in Greek will be aware of his participation in the editing of four successive editions of the United Bible Societies Greek New Testament (1966-1994), which gives particular attention to documenting theologically important variation in the Greek text, and the two editions of his very important textual commentary on the Greek text (1971, revised 1994), in which he discusses the reasoning that should be used in judging the varying readings of the text of the Greek New Testament in many important passages. Together with his aforementioned introduction to the textual criticism of the NT “The Text of the New Testament”, they constitute a set of works which will be used regularly by anyone who reads the Greek text of the NT with care. His “Manuscripts of the Greek Bible: An Introduction to Greek Paleography” (1st ed. 1981) succeeds (but does not entirely replace) the earlier and unobtainable albums on NT Greek paleography by W.H.P.Hatch. I wish that it had been available when I was teaching myself Byzantine Greek minuscule paleography in the early 1970s. He was also particularly active in the study of the early Eastern translations of the Bible, a testimonial to which is his distinguished monograph “The Early Versions of the New Testament” (1977). His book “The Bible in Translation: Ancient and Modern Versions” (2001) is for a more general audience.

Metzger wrote many specialized papers and many other books for students of the NT and especially of its text, at various levels, from the most elementary to recondite scholarly monographs and bibliographies. He gave much effort to works which would open the study of the textual criticism of the New Testament, not only to scholars who might specialize in it, but also to non-specialists for whom it might be meaningful. This sort of general publication has become more common in recent years, and is well exemplified in the popular and pedagogical writings of Bart Ehrman, who was among the last students of Metzger.

Metzger received much scholarly recognition. He was elected Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 1975, a group which in 1994 awarded him the F.C.Burkitt medal for his research on the Bible. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society class of humanities in 1986. At times he was a visiting scholar at nine different scholarly institutions, and he received many testimonials of academic recognition. The obituary by Metzger’s student Michael W. Holmes published by the Society of Biblical Literature describes him as “arguably the greatest textual specialist and biblical translator America has produced”. The same obituary bears witness to Metzger’s sterling personal qualities, which are testified to by many whose paths crossed his. Besides the obituaries on which I have drawn here (especially those in the New York Times, the Society of Biblical Literature Forum, the American Bible Society, Dan Wallace for the urn story, and Christianity Today), Metzger left an autobiography “Reminiscences of an Octogenarian” (1997).

When one reads the works of such a scholar as Metzger over many years, one gradually comes to understand the logic of the world of thought that he has created. The death of such a scholar would inevitably result in the destruction of that world, but with the genuine exception that his writings and teaching have the effect of its perpetuation, perpetuation not only among his own students but also among many whom he never met. Metzger himself learned from and freely acknowledged his appreciation for the work of many preceding scholars of all times; one fascinating aspect of his book on “The Text of the New Testament” is the extent to which it reflects the history of the study of its subject matter. Metzger’s thought-world will continue to exist in his writings, in the work of his students, and in the doings of other scholars and members of the broad interested public who learn from those whom he taught either directly or indirectly.
LinguistFriend

LINGUIST FRIEND ON THE DEATH OF FORMER CONGRESSMAN REV. ROBERT F. DRINAN

[After noting the death of Father Robert Drinan on Sunday, Jan.28, 2007, I realized that he was barely known to many of my coreligionists. The following brief notice draws on his obituaries published on the past January 29 in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and the Washington Post, which can be consulted for fuller information.]

The Massachusetts summer of 1970 was hot as I walked around the Watertown section of the Boston suburban congressional district where Father Robert Drinan, longtime Dean of the Boston College Law School, and more recently (1969-1970) provost and Vice President of BC, was running against incumbent U.S. Representative Philip J. Philbin, who had occupied the congressional seat for 28 years. My wife and sons were away for the summer in northern Maine, and the activity gave me an evening distraction from concentrating on a scholarly doctoral dissertation of a detailed sort which, as a Polish linguist wrote of his own master’s thesis, might have damaged a young mind. I was canvassing a multiethnic lower middle class district of aging houses, walking up and down rolling streets, wearing a suit and tie which immediately marked me as an outsider but dissociated the Drinan campaign from hippy opponents of the Vietnam war. Among the Watertown residents I met that summer, a U.S. government employee made it clear to me that he could not engage in public political activity. An elderly Armenian woman from Iran gave me tea as we talked politics in French, our only mutual language. A Harvard doctoral candidate in English, working on his own dissertation on Middle English literature, and his dancer wife, startled me with their loving combination of learning and beauty. At one point, whether as a matter of optimism or out of a sense of humor at the campaign headquarters (the chairman of his campaign was the present Senator John Kerry), I was assigned to canvass a nunnery, where I soon encountered the hostility of parochial Catholicism to Drinan’s outspoken Catholic liberalism. I did not need to go very far inside the nunnery to encounter such views; I was not allowed to get much further. Thirty percent of the voters in Drinan’s district thought that it was not appropriate for a priest to be active in politics. With a more positive view of these issues, supporters of the Drinan campaign would refer to “Our father, who art in congress.”

Drinan won the primary, and then in November 1970 he beat both a Republican opponent and write-in votes from the Philbin faction. In so doing, after leaving his administrative position at Boston College over the objections of his superiors, he was the only Roman Catholic priest to be elected as a voting member of Congress, although Protestant pastors had preceded him. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming a member of the 92^nd Congress the following January, and stayed in Congress for 10 years, until Pope John Paul II forbade priests to hold a legislative position, and Drinan was forced to either resign or cease to be a member of the clergy, which for him was unthinkable. In a 1992 interview with the Boston Globe, he commented “History will have to judge whether or not that was a wise decision”. You can read public statements from Senator Edward Kennedy and others in the New York Times and Washington Post for Jan. 29, 2007 as to what sort of congressman Drinan was: Kennedy said “The nation has lost one of the finest persons ever to serve in Congress.” In 2004, the American Bar Association awarded him the ABA Medal and described him as “the stuff of which legends are made.” Last year, he received the Congressional Distinguished Service award together with three other former members of the U.S.House. Rep. Edward J.Markey of Massachusetts described Drinan more pointedly, saying “When I arrived in Congress . . . Father Drinan was already serving as the conscience of the House of Representatives with every vote he cast.” An interesting point is that while serving in Congress, Drinan continued to wear his priestly clothing. He is quoted as saying “It’s the only suit I own”, but it is more likely that he saw his congressional activity as very much a continuation of his role as a Jesuit priest. John Kerry has phrased this same thought differently: the Globe obituary quotes him as saying “Father Drinan was a forever gentle, resilient, tenacious advocate for social justice and fundamental decency. . . . He lived out in public life the whole cloth of Catholic teachings.” The Georgetown Law dean, T. Alexander Aleinikoff, described him as “a man without rancor” whose beliefs made him view every human as “deserving respect and possessing dignity”, terms which should resonate with UUs.

Drinan, a distinguished legal scholar and teacher, had been Boston College law school dean and for a year (1969-1970) was vice president and provost of Boston College. He was effective as a member of the house Judiciary Committee. He was the first person “to file the resolution of impeachment against Nixon” (his own words), not because of the Watergate break-ins, but because of the massive bombing of Cambodia. Drinan opposed the draft and had liberal views about abortion and birth control which even now would arouse criticism in many religious circles. After stepping down from Congress, he accepted a position as law school professor at Georgetown University in 1981. “He taught courses on human rights, constitutional law, civil liberties, legislation, ethics and professional responsibility”, according to the New York Times.

Drinan was active for many liberal political causes, and wrote a number of books which were noteworthy more for legally informed advocacy of human rights than for traditional summaries for law students. Before campaigning for him, I had read two of his books on timely issues, “Democracy, Dissent, and Disorder” (1969) and “Vietnam and Armageddon” (1970), the latter of which even bore the imprimatur of Cardinal Cushing, the Archbishop of Boston. In recent years, he published “Can God and Caesar Coexist? Balancing Religious Freedom and International Law” (2005). He would have been teaching this semester, at age 86, if not for the failure of his health, which resulted in pneumonia and congestive heart failure from which he died on Sunday, January 28, 2007. You can find many more details in the obituaries noted above. At our local UU service last Sunday, I commented about him under “Joys and Concerns”, that his passing should be recognized not with grief at his death, but simply with joy that he lived.

LINGUIST FRIEND LOOKS BACK ON 2006 BLOGGING

When I looked over my year's compositions, I realized that most of them fell into a limited set of themes. More than I would have thought reflect an overlap of Jewish background and Unitarian themes. In this group, I especially like "Linguist Friend Muses about Steinmetz and his Minister" about a great and isolated research engineer, but my favorite is "In My Father's Synagogue" on my family’s venture into church-founding in the South of a half-century ago. They reflect the functioning of very different Unitarian churches. The discussion of Albert Schweitzer’s Unitarian connections in "A Unitarian More or Less", on the other hand, brings in a more explicitly Christian background.

I try to bring something distinctive in my short studies that aim to clarify or substantiate a Greek NT text; this is material that otherwise would not usually be available to UU audiences, or to most Christian ones. Fausto and I had a vigorous and stimulating discussion about Luke 2.14 (“Season’s Greetings from Linguist Friend: "Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men"”, and “A note from Linguist Friend on Luke 2.14" with related comments at The Socinian) in December. However, I think that the short sketch “Linguist Friend Puzzles over the Lord’s Prayer” in May provides a useful clarification of the significance of a prayer that is deeply meaningful to most people for whom Christianity is important. Since the sources of that prayer are mostly Jewish, of course, it could have gone into the first group.

LinguistFriend: BONHOEFFER ON GOD, IGNORANCE, AND KNOWLEDGE

I have been intrigued by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) for some time, but when I have read in his work, time after time I have found mainly exhortations to carry out the doctrines of his particular form of Christianity. However, sometimes a star flashes across the sky, as in an important passage in which he reflects on his reading in the physicist Carl von Weizsaecker's then recent book on "The World View of Physics" (1943). Bonhoeffer has in mind the common point of view in terms of which religion has to do with those problems of human existence for which science so far has provided no answers. Against this point of view, he writes of Weizsaecker's book: "It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that's bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat." To the contrary, he writes: "We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize the divine presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship between God and scientific knowledge, but it is also true of the wider human problems of death, suffering, and guilt." The text can be found in the collection "A Testament to Freedom" (1995, p.506).

From Bonhoeffer's suggestion, my thoughts leapt in two directions. One was towards the Hellenistic Jewish female personification of wisdom, which in this mode of thought is broad, ranging from the knowledge of a skilled workman to the principles of virtuous life. Traces or explicit mention of such personified wisdom can be found in various sections of the New Testament, and elsewhere in early Christian writings it is sometimes found in relation to the second and third persons of the trinity, as can be seen in the wonderful "Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church " (3^rd ed. 1997) and in citations under the word sophia in G.W.H.Lampe's "Patristic Greek Lexicon" (1968).

The second direction that came to mind was the concepts of God that were expressed at various times by Albert Einstein. When I was a young student, I had the privilege to know the physicist and philosopher Philipp Frank, who succeeded Einstein as professor of theoretical physics at the University of Prague in 1912. Frank knew Einstein and his work well, and wrote a classic biography of Einstein (1947). Frank noted that in some of his comments on religion, Einstein "wanted to emphasize the common ground of liberal Judaism and liberal Christianity in their conception of God." At other times, Einstein would use the term "God" as a figure of speech, as in his famous remark "God is sophisticated, but he is not malicious", indicating Einstein's personal faith that the world made sense and could be understood. It has often seemed to me that the traditional Jewish and Christian faiths are really quite conservative in their assumptions, compared to the faith of scientists that the world really does make sense, despite all of the evidence to the contrary.

Linguist Friend: BILL SCHULZ VISITS FROGTOWN

Last weekend, I broke my usual habit of working in my office on Sunday afternoon, going to First Unitarian Church of Toledo (OH) to hear a morning sermon and then an afternoon lecture by Bill Schulz, recently retired after twelve years as head of Amnesty International USA. Before that, Schulz was head of the UUA for eight years, after seven years there in other positions. At present, he is on a year's sabbatical at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. An article by Schulz on his experiences in dealing with torture, and a short sketch of him by Kimberley French, can be found in the Winter 2006 issue of UUWorld. The article about him can be found on line at uuworld.org.

His morning sermon was rather general, entitled "After the Ecstasy the Laundry: Human Rights and Our Unitarian Universalist Calling". It did not strain his voice or the opinions of the large audience, at least twice the size of the usual attendance at First Church. He brought his sermon to a close with a look back at his past twelve years, in words that I noted down at the time because they were so striking: "When I was the head of Amnesty International, I lost my faith every night, and every morning I regained it with the coming of the light."

In the afternoon, he moved on to the topic of his present concern, and hit his stride, speaking of "Restoring America's Good Name: The State of Human Rights Today". I cannot recall the details of his exposition, and those who read the newspapers do not need to hear them. But again his conclusion was telling, and his point will be well made if I retell it as best I can. He told of how one of his Polish Jewish relatives (an uncle, I think) had gone back to visit Poland repeatedly after the Second World War. There are few Jews left in Poland, and Jewish visitors are not always welcomed. On the first time that he went back there, when he visited his former village, the uncle was mocked and abused by six Polish boys. In return, the uncle told them a Jewish story. Those who have read Eli Wiesel and Martin Buber know the magic of such stories. The uncle came back to that village many times, always interacting with the young people, and somehow building and maintaining a connection with the young people who at first had mocked him. Finally, of course, he died, and the six young people who at first had mocked him, now grown, said the Mourner's Kaddish for him, the Jewish prayer spoken for the dead person by those who mourn him. You may not realize it, but you know the essence of the first part of the Kaddish prayer, because the first lines of the Lord's Prayer are based on it. But what speaks particularly to Schulz's point, although he did not say so, is its end: "He who maketh peace in his high places, may he make peace for us and for all Israel; and say ye, Amen." In view of the conduct in the world of our country in recent years, Schulz said that he was concerned as to whether there would be anyone who would say Kaddish for us if it were needed. He spoke these words loudly.

A NOTE FROM LINGUIST FRIEND ON LUKE 2:14 "PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN" IN RESPONSE TO THE SOCINIAN

The Socinian takes issue with my comments on the text of Luke 2:14, comments in which I point out the general scholarly opinion for the last nearly 140 years on the reading and meaning of the original Greek text of Luke 2:14. The Socinian rejects this consensus, and adduces besides a Latin version, many examples from older English translations of the Bible to bolster an argument that the Authorized Version text reflects the original Greek reading in this passage. A basic problem in this procedure is that early English translations are as irrelevant to the establishment of the original Greek text of the NT as the study of Schlegel and Tieck's German translations of Shakespeare's plays would be for the establishment of Shakespeare's original English text.

The NT is an anthology of Greek texts. Modern scholarly editions of it have been created by textual criticism on the basis of some 5,700 Greek NT manuscripts, with secondary input from translations and quotations of the NT (B.M.Metzger and B.D. Ehrman "The Text of the New Testament", 2005). Textual criticism is partly a technical field, partly a historical one. From the technical aspect, it has a deductive basis comparable to mathematical logic, computer programming, and formal and historical linguistics. From the historical aspect, textual criticism requires reference to a large mass of material which reflects many aspects of history. This material is quite varied, and it is hard to predict which aspect will be crucial in a given case. Only part of the job is technical, and theology certainly has its role in textual criticism, as Bart Ehrman has emphasized in his book on "The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture" (1993).

Now let me expand on what I mean in saying that textual criticism is at some stages a technical field. For a parallel example, if one wants to be prepared to make a qualified argument about heat conduction in solids or diffusion, one must learn to use the relevant mathematics of parabolic differential equations. By way of contrast, the Socinian displays such varied learning, enthusiasm for his subject, and commitment to his views, that the reader could easily overlook the basic question as to whether one who makes no use of Greek texts is prepared to establish the correct reading of a Greek text. For comparison, I have written two papers during the present year in which I had to make use of the collaboration of a competent Arab scholar in a study of a fascinating scientific text in classical Arabic (which I do not read) from a thousand years ago. Even in the case of very concrete subject matter with which I am well acquainted, with highly qualified collaboration, such a procedure is risky and difficult, and I have misgivings over what I have been able to accomplish with this procedure.

I work very differently in the case of a Greek NT text such as the present one, for which I am much better prepared, since Greek is the language in which I ordinarily read the NT. I ask first what is the early attestation of the Greek passage in question in the first three centuries, which means especially in the texts of the Greek papyri, most of which were unavailable to the 19th century scholars. Then I see what is the information in the latest Nestle-Aland edition, which gives selected variants of the Greek text for a wide range of NT passages, and the latest edition of the United Bible Societies, which gives a wider set of variants for each of a smaller set of Greek passages. I look at the older classic edition by Tischendorf (1869-1872), which is still of much use. Issues of the relation to one another of gospel passages of which there are multiple versions in different gospels are treated in works such as Aland's grand synopis of the gospels. Then I look into grammatical issues: the grammars of NT Greek by F.Blass and A.Debrunner, J.H.Moulton and Nigel Turner, and A.T.Robertson, and E.Mayser's grammar of the Greek papyri are all great works, and their number grows continually. Some of the Greek words in the NT are not obvious, and it is always worthwhile to check what the various editions of Bauer's wonderful NT lexicon and Kittel's theological lexicon say about an important word. The commentaries add further analysis and illumination from related material; for Luke, that of I. Howard Marshall is remarkably good. Once this preliminary work has been done, one can consider a theological question.

To be clear, I am not a practicing specialist in New Testament studies, but rather a user of them. I was forced to become familiar with the (especially Byzantine) textual variants of the Greek New Testament, especially the gospels, in other research, and I have maintained and expanded that familiarity over several decades. My role here is simply that of a philologically trained linguist. My only published contribution to biblical studies concerned the intertestamental literature.

To follow the present argument, there are fine books to use such as E.J.Goodspeed's "Problems of N.T. Translation" (1945), which successfully bridges between nonspecialist readers and the special information on which textual criticism is based. Goodspeed's commentary on the passage in question is readable and excellent. So is Bruce Metzger's treatment in his "Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament" (1994), but it is more technical and perhaps has a trace of Calvinist orientation.

The Socinian argues that the text in question is universalist (small u) in orientation. He believes that it is not restrictive to a particular Jewish or Christian group as I have argued. I believe that the restrictive interpretation is quite characteristic of Hellenistic Judaism and its transition into Jewish Christianity. I feel that his interpretation is very attractive, and that it would be a desirable modern modification of the text. I do not believe that his establishment of the reading and interpretation of the passage is accurate for early Christianity, which is my focus in such studies. He projects a modern interpretation into an ancient world in which it is out of place. I leave the argument in terms of the content of the passage there, because I believe that the argument on the basis of the manuscript evidence is capable of more systematic demonstration than is the theological argument. Once the text is established, the argument in terms of the content of the passage must follow the manuscript evidence.

The Socinian refers repeatedly to a "lost original verse", "lost Greek phrase", "lost phrase", "now-lost original words" of the passage in Luke 2:14. However, the Greek text of this passage which, as I have already pointed out in my preceding post, is supported by current scholarship, and is rejected by the Socinian in its translated form, is not only a preserved Greek variant, it is preserved in all of the most important early uncial manuscripts of the Greek NT. It is the original reading in Codex Sinaiticus (Sin.), is found in Codex Alexandrinus (A), is the original reading in Codex Vaticanus (B), and is found in Codex Bezae (D) and the Freer Codex (W). For any Greek NT reading to be attested by this set of manuscripts, representing the Alexandrian text (Sin., B, W in this section), the Western text (D), and the oldest form of the Byzantine text (A), constitutes an extremely strong argument for the originality of the text. The text is marked with the letter A in the edition of the United Bible Societies and in Metzger's commentary; this is explained "The letter A indicates that the text is certain". (One must distinguish, of course, between the evaluative "A" and the symbol "A" for Codex Alexandrinus.) This is a relatively straightforward argument in terms of external evidence (in F.J.A.Hort's term) which is accepted by competent scholars; theological interpretations must be adapted to it.

The Socinian gives an interesting reference in a comment to his own reply, to a discussion of this passage by T.L. Hubeart, Jr., as supporting his views. Hubeart concludes that "On balance, then, it seems more likely that the passage in this gospel of Luke would extend "good will" to all, rather than reflecting a restriction on the gift of Christ to those "in whom he is well pleased" which accords with the hyper-predestination of some theologies." His argument is in the spirit of those who wish to preserve the readings underlying the Authorized Version, disregarding the fact that at least 80,000 textual changes reflected in modern printings were made in the AV by the revisor Benjamin Blayney in his edition of 1769 (E.J.Goodspeed "As I Remember", p.169). Hubeart also attacks the work of A.T.Robertson, a very distinguished Baptist scholar of the NT, arguably the most outstanding specialist in the world on the language of the NT in his generation at the beginning of the 20th century. In particular, he attacks Robertson's treatment of this passage in Robertson's still valuable six-volume commentary on the NT with the awkward title "Word Pictures in the NT" (1930). Hubeart gives priority to what is called "the majority text" of the NT, the widely attested late Byzantine Greek text on which the early editions of the NT were based. So it is inevitable that he prefers the readings of a translation based on the early NT editions based on the Byzantine Greek text. However, the available information on the Greek text and its interpretation have expanded so greatly since the issuance of the AV in 1611 that this is a risky approach. Fortunately, this view is waning: the second edition of the "Evangelical Dictionary of Theology " (ed. Walter Elwell, 2001) has a good article on textual criticism and theology of the NT by Philip W. Comfort, the primary editor of a very useful collection (2001) of the readings of the NT papyri for the first three centuries of the common era.

LinguistFriend

I love it when they do this. -CC

Season's Greetings from Linguist Friend: "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to men"

My ears often perk up at Christmas services when the angelic host's song in Luke 2.14 is read aloud in the beautiful text of the Authorized Version (AV): "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men". The AV was based partly on early printed editions of the Greek NT, for which the main available sources were late and poor Greek manuscripts of the NT. Erasmus, the editor of the first published edition of the Greek NT text (1516 and later), lacked both adequate Greek NT manuscript resources and time to use them, and could have no concept of the appropriate principles to govern a critical edition of the Greek NT. C.R.Gregory pointed this out long ago (Textkritik des NT, 1902, II, 928-931), and less trenchantly so did Metzger in his classic manual of NT textual criticism (2005 ed. by B.Ehrman). Although the AV is widely revered, sometimes the Greek text which is its basis disagrees with the results of modern scholarship.

As an aside, the usual Latin version, which was ubiquitous in the Western world and traces of which appear in many versions, can be translated as "Glory in the highest to God, and on earth peace among men of good will". This last phrase could be read to suggest (fairly reasonably) that peace is dependent on the attitude of men, an interpretation that is generally rejected as inconsistent with the theology of Luke.

Unfortunately, this passage (Luke 2.14) does not appear in the Greek texts of the NT which survive from the first three centuries of the Christian era, so scholars must rely on later sources, from the 4th century onward. They are well presented in the Nestle-Aland editions and in the United Bible Societies' editions of the Greek NT. Tischendorf, who in the 19th century added more to our knowledge of the Greek NT sources than any other scholar, reconstructed the now accepted Greek text of this passage from available sources (1869). The Revised Version (RV) of 1881, the revisors of which included F.J.A.Hort and B.F.Westcott, editors of the best critical British Greek NT text of the 19th century (also 1881), implied recognition of the correct Greek text. The RV had "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men in whom he is well pleased", noting Greek variants. Bruce Metzger in his textual commentary on the NT (1994) summarized the reasoning for accepting a Greek text which would correspond to something like the RSV "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased", which was modified to "among those whom he favors" in the NRSV.

Semitic equivalents of the Greek expression meaning "men of [his] pleasure", hypothesized on the basis of the reconstructed Greek text, have subsequently been found in Hebrew and Aramaic texts from Qumran. That such Semitic phrases underlay the Greek text had long been suggested, e.g. in Matthew Black's book on the Aramaic background of the gospels and Acts (3rd ed. 1967). I.Howard Marshall's (1978) commentary on Luke provides a scholarly overview.

Thus, we know beyond reasonable doubt what are the original text, meaning, and background of this passage in Luke. However, the uncomfortable thing is that the original reading of this passage is much less congenial in a UU context than is the later and corrupted reading. The later reading extends peace and good will to men in general; one could say that it is universalist, while the original text is more restrictive, and not as open-hearted.

Perhaps partly because of its implied universalism, this defective reading of the Authorized Version has left many traces in the English-language religious tradition, perpetuated in verse and song. To some it will seem that it is an inadvertent theological improvement, but if we wish to understand the origins and development of Christian thought, it is simply an accidental dead end.

LinguistFriend

Voltaire could say no more.

In the Toledo Blade, on Sept. 20, 2006, on pp. 1 and 12 of the first
section, it was noted that in a church bulletin from St. Hedwig Catholic Church on
Lagrange St., on Sunday, there appeared an interesting announcement.
"Listed in between announcements for a polka night and a prayer service was
an item from "Friends/Supporters of Fr. Robinson" announcing a
chicken-dinner fund-raiser for Gerald Robinson, the Toledo priest convicted
in May in the ritual murder of a nun 26 years ago." Further on, we read
"Robinson, 68, was arrested in April 2004, and convicted May 11 in Lucas
County Common Pleas Court for the murder of sister Margaret Ann Pahl in the chapel at Mercy Ann Hospital in April, 1980." On the bulletin board at St. Hedwig's, the announcement of the chicken dinner was posted above a flyer for a Right to Life event.

From an article by David Yonke, Blade religious editor.