• Philip Jenkins is a Christian historian who wrote recently about a 1746 manuscript from the French Benedictine scholar Antoine Augustin Calmet. That may sound dusty and esoteric, like there’s nothing more I could say to convince you to click that link. But trust me, this is fantastic.
Because even if you’ve never heard of Calmet, you’re familiar with the substance of his book: Dissertations on the Apparitions of Angels, of Demons and of Spirits, and on Revenants or Vampires of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Moravia and of Silesia.
Calmet’s Dissertations is absolutely one of the books that Rupert Giles brought with him to the Sunnydale library. It’s the granddaddy of all vampire books. “Much as he would have loathed the title,” Jenkins writes, “Calmet was the godfather of modern horror writing.”
Jenkins sees Calmet as sometimes Mulder, sometimes Scully: “Calmet himself often comes across as a skeptic, even when he is discussing these supernatural horrors. He presents the great vampire scare almost as a fad, a moral panic, the sort of thing that people fret about every few years.”
Jenkins’ post includes several excerpts involving official accounts, as well as links to a virtual library of these eerie old texts. “You don’t have to believe any of these reports as literal to accept that a real scare or panic was in progress,” he writes. And you can choose either Mulder or Scully’s explanation for that.
• “We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the young-Earth creationist flood geology began to take hold …”
Atlas Obscura has some pretty pictures of the Rainbow Basin in the California desert. The multi-colored strata of sedimentary rock there were not magically formed 6,00 years ago in Noah’s flood. Creation is far older, more beautiful, wonderful, and interesting than that.
• Speaking of western deserts …
• That time when Ronald Reagan starred in the Hollywood movie version of a WWII GI drag show.
• “What you are about to do, do quickly” is, indeed, something Jesus said during the Last Supper, but this wasn’t what he meant.
• We may need to revisit concussion protocols for clergy: “Pastor falls 30 feet off roof, preaches 2 days later.”
The pastor and his wife credit his survival and lack of long-term injury to God and the power of prayer. Some credit should also go, apparently, to Siri. (And now I’m wondering what happens if one says, “Alexa, pray for us now and at the hour of our death.”)
Also, too: the use of PPE and fall protection are signs of wisdom, not of weakness. (I say this all the time at work, so let me say it again here.)
• TFG’s flailing legal team is arguing that stealing classified government documents is the same thing as retaining personal records. As Adventus-blogger rmj notes, that’s not a great argument, but I’m fascinated by the details of the case they attempt to cite as precedent:
During his White House tenure, Bill Clinton spoke at some length with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, and as part of the project, there were many recordings of their conversations. According to one 2007 account, tapes were at one point stored in a sock drawer.
A conservative group called Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit, demanding that Clinton be forced to turn over the recordings. In 2012, a federal court rejected the organization’s claims, concluding that the tapes were personal records, not official presidential materials.
Set aside the many, many ways in which that case has nothing to do with TFG’s purloined letters and the state secrets he may or may not have been sharing with/selling to whoever wandered into Xan-a-Lago. What fascinates me here is the chutzpah of Judicial Watch claiming they gave a damn about the work of Taylor Branch.
The mission of Judicial Watch is to overturn, overrule, and roll back every gain of the Civil Rights Movement. Branch won his Pulitzer by writing a monumental three-volume history of that very same Civil Rights Movement. Rather than merely denying JW’s demand to hear Branch’s interviews with Clinton, the court should have turned over audiobooks of Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge and forced Larry Klayman to listen to them. Twice.
• “39% of Americans Believe the World Is Ending.”
They’re not wrong, exactly. Each of us is, today, one day closer to the End of the World for each of us. Two men will be working in the field and one will be taken and the other will be left … for now. “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come.”
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