In response to my post on Thursday about some anticapitalist teachings in Scripture, several readers wrote in citing another biblical custom that's not particularly laissez-faire: the jubilee.
The least likely reason, among the eight choices offered, was to learn about abortion and homosexuality; just two in 10 Bible readers, including 15percentt of those younger than 45, said they consulted Scripture for guidance on those issues.
Sure enough, he confesses that he is not a "reader of Scripture" - allegedly because he's Catholic.
Just as Dante wrote the Divine Comedy to move a reader toward Scripture (or so he said), Nabokov wrote his translation to inspire his reader to know the poem in Russian: It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin's language and go through EO again without this crib.
Those few initiates who learned the Scripture, who were called "readers," were often dispatched into the interior to preach in untouched regions.
Time and again, the books of the Hebrew scriptures remind its readers not to forget that they too were once in this situation and their ethics must be structured around practical help driven by fellow-feeling.
An alert reader of that scripture might notice some subtle changes in Byrne's approach.
The Hindu scripture, Bhagavad-Gita, instructs its readers that food and meals are provided to enable us to achieve our purpose in life.
This epistemic dualism, to the effect that we acquire some beliefs from natural knowledge and others from Scripture, has been understood, by some readers, as intellectually dishonest and as a typical libertine camouflage for cryptic materialism (Hallyn, 2005).
RC: Yes, I wanted the Scripture Sancta to feel familiar to readers.
