“Because there shall be ever some poor in the land, therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand unto thy brother, to thy needy, and to thy poor in thy land.” — Deuteronomy 15:11

My copy of the 1560 Calvinist Geneva Bible translation gives this footnote:

“Thou shalt be liberal.”

Still not OK after Marilynne Robinson answered 5 of the (7 👀) questions I put to her in the Q&A chat box during a zoom thing last night.

[it’s my birthday tomorrow, so just about the best unintended gift ever]

✨

I love how Moby Dick is wise to the Bible’s tenderness toward pagans/non-believers, more so than some Christians.

We covered Jonah at Sunday Youth earlier — when faced with the knowledge that throwing Jonah overboard would calm the storm, those pagan sailors decide to row harder against the waves.

My talk 'Clearing up after great men: Granny Blackburn and the untold mess of post-imperial Britain' attracted the ire of one ardent Empire apologist in Shoreham. He challenged me afterwards: "All those people killed? Their families benefitted from it" 🤔

thanks, @annierose25.bsky.social, @wednesdayerskin.bsky.social, @jancarsonwrites.bsky.social, @angelagraham.bsky.social, @michellegallen.bsky.social, @yopopodawn.bsky.social ✨

found this so beautiful. a film anthology of writers, and the lands these women rise from:

Anne McMaster
Frances Molloy
Olivia Elder
Sarah Leech
Frances Browne
Pauline Holland
Janet McNeill
Ruth Carr
Jan Carson
Wendy Erskine
Michelle Gallen
Angela Graham
Dawn Watson

“By the lonely crossroads
Locals called Eternity Corner…
He threw his mother’s fiddle out
To the middle of the starlit lough…

These are the troubled waters
That I wade through every night
To listen for the music that
My father threw away for love.”

— Philip Orr on his father, Co. Down preacher.

i tell you even the very stones
will cry out — luke 19:40

The sky is slashed like a sail. Night folds
over the shears, the dye, the docked tails.
We listen to the rumours of the valley:
goats’ voices, gear-changes, the stirring of dogs.

— Three Ways of Looking at God by Robin Robertson

/ she travelled at night / …she was a deer holding a rifle / a cow milking her master / but the price of freedom / is the knowledge you are trapped /

/ what if / there were a place for us / some country / a land in parenthesis /

— legend of the first butch by joelle taylor, ‘c+nto & othered poems’

the truth must
dazzle gradually

John Donne:

“If I should aske the Basilisk, how camest thou by those killing eyes, he would tell me, Thy God made me so.

…all things that are, are equally removed from being nothing; and whatsoever hath any beeing, is by that very beeing, a glasse in which we see God…”

Marilynne Robinson, "Language Is Smarter Than We Are" (1987).

www.nytimes.com/1987/01/11/b...

“…There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of Creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together…”

Happy 81st birthday, Marilynne Robinson. Every solstice, I return to a 6 min clip of her reading from the end of ‘Gilead’ and I swear I can feel the world turning.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?