Scholar Sunday Quotes

Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came to being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old. These dates are incorrect. Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508BC. These suggestions are also incorrect. Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour. The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet.

When [Jesus] wanted fully to explain what his forthcoming death was all about,” writes New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, “he didn’t give a theory. He didn’t even give them a set of scriptural texts. He gave them a meal.”46 I guess sometimes you just have to taste and see.

What a strange picture a University presents to the imagination. The lives of scholars in their cloistered stillness;--literary men of retired habits, and Professors who study sixteen hours a day, and never see the world but on a Sunday. Nature has, no doubt, for some wise purpose, placed in their hearts this love of literary labor and seclusion. Otherwise, who would feed the undying lamp of thought? But for such men as these, a blast of wind through the chinks and crannies of this old world, or the flapping of a conqueror's banner, would blow it out forever.

I had at one time over forty scholars, and those of the right sort, ardently desiring to learn. They were of all ages, though mostly men and women. I look back to those Sundays with an amount of pleasure not to be expressed. They were great days to my soul. The work of instructing my dear fellow-slaves was the sweetest engagement with which I was ever blessed. We loved each other, and to leave them at the close of the Sabbath was a severe cross indeed. When I think that these precious souls are to-day shut up in the prison-house of slavery, my feelings overcome me, and I am almost ready to ask, "Does a righteous God govern the universe

Most of the people who are trained in Bible scholarship have been educated in theological institutions. Of course, a wide range of students head off to seminaries every year. Many of them have been involved with Bible studies through their school years, even dating back to their childhood Sunday School classes. But they have typically approached the Bible from a devotional point of view, reading it for what it can tell them about what to believe and how to live their lives. As a rule, such students have not been interested in or exposed to what scholars have discovered about the difficulties of the Bible when it is studied from a more academic, historical perspective.

If you find any difficulty in illustrating your subject, I should strongly recommend you to try to teach children whenever you can get an opportunity of doing so. I do not know a better way of schooling your own mind to the use of illustrations than frequently to take a class in the Sunday-school, or to give addresses to the scholars as often as you can;

According to one scholar, the “ideal victim” in the Troubles was someone who was not a combatant, but a passive civilian. To many, Jean McConville was the perfect victim: a widow, a mother of ten. To others, she was not a victim at all, but a combatant by proxy, who courted her own fate. Of course, even if one were to concede, for the sake of argument, that McConville was an informer, there is no moral universe in which her murder and disappearance should be justified. Must it be the case that how one perceives a tragedy will forever depend on where one sits? The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once observed that, “for the majority of the human species, and for tens of thousands of years, the idea that humanity includes every human being on the face of the earth does not exist at all. The designation stops at the border of each tribe, or linguistic group, sometimes even at the edge of a village.” When it came to the Troubles, a phenomenon known as “whataboutery” took hold. Utter the name Jean McConville and someone would say, What about Bloody Sunday? To which you could say, What about Bloody Friday? To which they could say, What about Pat Finucane? What about the La Mon bombing? What about the Ballymurphy massacre? What about Enniskillen? What about McGurk’s bar? What about. What about. What about.

That this exceptionally scholarly man whose judgments, always rich and sensitive, though sometimes austere, should have embarked on an intensely romantic retelling of the old Cornish legend of that famous pair of tragic lovers, Tristan and Queen Iseult, is intriguing in itself. But what makes it even more fascinating is that Daphne du Maurier, asked by “Q” ’s daughter long after her father’s death to finish this novel that he had set aside “near the end of a chapter, halfway through,” did so in such a skillful fashion that it is impossible to guess with any certainty the exact point at which she began to write. She says, in a modest foreword, that she “could not imitate ‘Q’’s style… that would have been robbing the dead,” but she had known him when she was a child, remembered him as a genial host at many a Sunday supper, and “by thinking back to conversations long forgotten” she could recapture something of the man himself and trust herself to “fall into his mood.

I’m betting that if there is a God who created the mountains, he or she would rather have me spend my Sunday afternoon breathing in the sweet mountain air than squeezing in between overweight, flatulent parishioners in an uncomfortable church pew. I’m betting that if there is a God, he or she has a sense of humor and will think that teaching my little cousins how to make fart noises during Sunday school is a more worthwhile endeavor than helping them memorize ancient scriptures some bible scholars scarcely understand. I’m wagering that if there is a God, he or she designed sex to feel good, and that I’ll be a better person from regularly performing what most Christians would consider unspeakably perverse lovemaking acts to my wife than by living a chaste life with a bunch of hairy social outcasts in some remote monastery in the Himalayas.

Before me a scholarly man, of European culture, head of a literary department in one of the great universities of the West. He speaks of it with bitterness, as do almost all his colleagues. Culture is not what it was and he has not the slightest regard for mass culture. He comes from New York and, deep down, he despises California, his colleagues and the decline of standards. He gets 60-80,000 dollars a year and does not have many students or friends. He has lots of ideas, is sincere, proud and awkward. His secret is his python. I see him plunge his gloved hand into its glass case and stroke the reptile's head, which shoots out a voracious tongue and uncoils itself, still famished though it has just devoured a rat. We discuss the diet of snakes. A tortoise slumbers by the fireside in the glow of an artificial wood fire. It is Sunday in Santa Monica. Towards four, the sun drives away the mists of the Pacific. But the snake knows neither night nor day; he is immortal and poisonous and, in the words of the poet, he dreams on the hills of the sky. Which is something his master does not do, he whose reptilian brain identifies with the snake's, and who stares long and hard into his face, even though ordinarily he is incapable of looking people straight in the eye. A perverse couple, the somnambulism of the intellectual mingling with the inner night of the reptile.

Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the Earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old. These dates are incorrect. Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760 BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508 BC. These suggestions are also incorrect. Archbishop James Ussher (1580-1656) published 'Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti' in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour. The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet. This proves two things: Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. Secondly, the Earth's a Libra. The astrological prediction for Libra in the 'Your Stars Today' column of the 'Tadfield Advertiser', on the day this history begins, read as follows:- "LIBRA. 24 September-23 October. You may be feeling run down and always in the same old daily round. Home and family matters are highlighted and are hanging fire. Avoid unnecessary risks. A friend is important to you. Shelve major decisions until the way ahead seems clear. You may be vulnerable to a stomach upset today, so avoid salads. Help could come from an unexpected quarter." This was perfectly correct on every count except for the bit about the salads.

Many women I met during my time in the academy were very good to me. But in the wake of everything I lost, I wanted to reclaim parts of me with some semblance of wholeness before everything was burned in the fire. To do that, I needed to reconnect with people who knew me before I began chasing whatever success I thought I'd find being an acclaimed Womanist scholar. I need the people who knew me when my dreams were big, and my spirit and heart were unbroken.

Like most people in Connecticut in those days, I was brought up to attend church regularly on Sunday, and long before I could read I was a prominent scholar in the Sunday school. My good mother taught me my lessons in the New Testament and the Catechism, and my every effort was directed to win one of those “Rewards of Merit,” which promised to pay the bearer one mill, so that ten of these prizes amounted to one cent, and one hundred of them, which might be won by faithful assiduity every Sunday for two years, would buy a Sunday school book worth ten cents. Such were the magnificent rewards held out to the religious ambition of youth.