Our Lady of the Forest

Have nearly finished Dave Guterson's 'Our Lady of the Forest' and what a damn fine read it has been!

Set in the dank forests of the Pacific north-west, near a run-down logging town populated by the disillusioned and feckless (think 'Shameless' meets 'Axe Men'), it tells the story of Ann, a frail, runaway, asthmatic teenage survivor of chronic sexual and drug abuse. Scratching a living by finding chanterelle mushrooms in the forests' undergrowth, she finds herself receiving 'visitations' from the Virgin Mary. Before long she has attracted the attention of the bored, the curious, the religious and the exploitative. One is never quite sure about the provenance of these sightings: are they induced by her constant self-medication for her various ailments? Stoner flashbacks? Desire for attention? Or her subliminal longing for a non-judgmental mother who will protect her from what her own flesh and blood failed to?

It's beautifully written and Guterson evokes well the menacing atmosphere of both the forest and of the increasingly hysterical swarm of pilgrims that gather, plaguing her to intercede for them. I'm not sure how it will end.

He has assembled a cast of pretty unappealing characters: Tom Cross, the surly ex-logger whose driven machismo has led to his son's quadriplegia in a work-related accident; Father Collins, a young but rather world-weary priest who finds himself attracted to Ann rather more than just spiritually; Carolyn Greer, a cynical new-ager and Ann's self-appointed spokeswoman who cares neither for Ann nor her visitations just so long as she gets a cut of the profits, and Father Butler, a gimlet-eyed doctrinaire who is intent on certifying the girl as a fraud or psychotic.

I just hope it's not one of those books that run out of steam in the last few chapters. There are a number of themes running through the book: can they be brought to a satisfying and united resolution? I hope so!

Sisters of Sinai

Recently I've been quite good with online purchases, that is, I've been staying away from Amazon and the like* and restricting my purchases to second-hand/charity shops. However, I had to make an exception today when I read about a newly published book called 'Sisters of Sinai' by Janet Soskice. It is right up my street: travel, preservation of knowledge, biblical and female scholarship combined. The Random House review reads:

'Sisters of Sinai tells an extraordinary tale of nineteenth century exploration; how two Scottish sisters made one of the most important ancient manuscript finds of the age. Hidden in a cupboard beneath the monastic library at St Catherine’s in the Sinai desert the twins discovered what looked like a palimpsest: one text written over another.It was Agnes who recognized the obscured text for what it was – one of the earliest copies of the Gospels written in ancient Syriac.Once they had overcome the stubborn reluctance of Cambridge scholars to authenticate the find and had lead an expedition of quarrelsome academics back to Sinai to copy it, Agnes and Margaret –in middle years and neither with any university qualifications – embarked on a life of demanding scholarship and bold travel.In this enthralling book, Janet Soskice takes the reader on an astonishing journey from the Ayreshire of the sisters’ childhood to the lost treasure trove of the Cairo genizah.We trace the footsteps of the intrepid pair as they voyage to Egypt, Sinai and beyond, Murray’s guide book in hand coping with camels, unscrupulous dragomen, and unpredictable welcomes.We enter the excitement and mystery of the Gospel origins at a time when Christianity was under attack in Europe.Crucially this is the story of two remarkable women who, as widows, were undeterred in their spirit of adventure and who overcame insuperable odds to become world class scholars with a place in history.'

The author is Reader in Philosophical Theology at Jesus College, Cambridge.

I await my copy with great eagerness.

*interestingly enough, once again it was cheaper to get this volume from The Book Depository through Amazon, rather than from The Book Depository direct.

HT Evangelical Textual Criticism

Cranfield Calls

When I was working at my desk the other day, I ran out of space and had to move some books out of the way (it happens quite often). So I picked up the two volumes of John Chrysostom's homilies and put them on the shelf just under the printer and forgot about them. Dammit - forgot the sun swings round during the course of the day so that by two in the afternoon that shelf is bathed in full sunlight - which did my two new acquisitions absolutely no good at all!

So much for letting them dry out slowly: the bottom-most one was OKish, but the front cover of the upper one was bent as a banana by the sun's unrelenting warmth.

I had to call in LSJ (my biggest book) as well as a couple of concordances BDAG and BDF to weigh the b*gger down and flatten the cover out again. I curse my oversight. Now I need to conserve the spine with some appropriately organic glue. Fish bone or hooves, I think.

It still being Lent, and having finished The Book of Margery Kempe, I am going to turn my attention to Julian of Norwich's 'Revelations of Divine Love'. I bought this Penguin Classics version second-hand a number of years ago and now intend to re-read it as a spiritual companion piece of contemporaneous medieval piety. I also have 'The Cloud of Unknowing' (again a second-hand Penguin Classics) which I may read during Easter week if I have finished Dame Julian's book.

The Douglas Moo commentary on Paul's epistle to the Romans is most excellent: his attention to the textual and linguistic issue puts it squarely in my field of interest. However, as I am currently looking in great detail at Romans 5:12-14, I find my self time and time again directed towards C.E.B Cranfield's two-volume ICC commentary, constantly cited as THE authoritative voice on this epistle. And can I find a pre-owned copy? Well, yes I can, but not for less than £40! I have the Sanday ICC precursor to Cranfield and that is quite adequate, but it's the Cranfield that I really hanker for. It IS on Google books, but as is so often the case, the very pages that I wish to consult are 'not part of this preview'. Most vexing. Nor will the all-in-one Cranfield commentary fit the bill, as in its drive to become more compact and, I suppose, more user-friendly, it has omitted the very textual matters that I find so interesting. That's a shame because the compendium volume is easily and cheaply available brand-new. Ah!....but I LIKE the older ICC's with their green cloth covers and gilt titles, and their slightly musty smell and damp feel......I promise I will not let them sunbathe neglected on my shelf.....

The (damp) Homilies of John Chrysostom

Spotted two 'Library of the Fathers' volumes of John Chrysostom's homilies (6 & 7; Romans and Galatians & Ephesians) in the Barbican Bookshop the other day. I was initially quite interested, but it was only when I started reading Douglas Moo's NICNT commentary on Romans, and saw that he notes Chrysostom's preference in 5:1 for the hortatory subjunctive ἔχωμεν ('let us have') over the present active indicative ἔχομεν ('we have') that I thought Oooh! Textual commentary! So of course I went back this morning and purchased the two books, invoking my 15% theological student-card privileges. I wonder where the other volumes of the series have gone? The volume on Romans is in a particularly delapidated condition and needs attention to the spine (my last university's remedy was a nice thick piece of electrical tape!), and both smell somewhat damp, so I'll need to dry them out v-e-r-y slowly and thoroughly. I'm gradually accumulating a good selection of patrologia, including two of the Eerdmans Ante-Nicene Fathers series (volumes 1 & 2; Justin Martyr & Irenaeus and Hermas, Tatian, Athenagorus, Theophilus & Clement of Alexandria respectively) and the Loeb Ehrman 2 volume 'Apostolic Fathers'. But my dream-buy, only achievable with lottery-funding would be a complete set of the Eerdmans (both Ante-Nicene and Nicene) from the local St Paul's bookshop. If I get doctoral funding this year.....(hah!)*sigh* One can dream. Otherwise I'll just have to stick to scuffling around 2nd hand bookshops and charity shops for random opportune buys. Though actually, it's probably more fun and better for the soul to do it this way.

Moo or Peake?

This quite often happens to me: I buy a book that I have been craving for some time (in this instance Douglas Moo's NICNT commentary on Romans) and dang me if I find, completely serendipitously, another book on the very same day that I just have to buy (Peake' s Commentary on the Bible - £4.99 from Oxfam). Now I just can't decide which one merits first read: Moo or Peake? Each of the weighty volumes tick different boxes, the detailed or the broad, and I'm impressed by the scholarly names appended to the articles in the latter: Henry Chadwick, Charles Cranfield, Geoffrey Lampe, Bruce Metzger, Charles Moule, Nigel Turner and Allen Wikgren int al. A perfect snapshot of traditional biblical exegesis.

Of course it's not a bad dilemma to face: I'll just have to ramp up my reading hours by waking up an hour earlier than ususal, and going to bed an hour later at night.

Gender Analysis Part 3

Back to 60% certainty now......must've been the OMG that swung the percentages back up!

Gender Analysis Part 2

OMG! After writing the last post I re-fed the blog back into the gender analyzer...and guess what...it's now only 53% certain to have been written by a woman!

Gender Analysis

Over at http://genderanalyzer.com/ they're 56% percent certain that this blog is written by a woman. I wonder what clues they look for? I'm going to feed in some obviously girly/blokey websites and see just how high the testosterone/oestrogen percentage gets.
Actually, I'm quite proud of being somewhat ambiguous to a computer program!

The Book of Margery Kempe

Picked up for 59p at the Help the Aged charity shop.

It's an interesting little book, the autobiographical ramblings of a woman, born at the end of the 14th century, who may have been a true mystic, receiving many communications from Christ, or a raving psychotic, depending on your world-view. The non-chronological anecdotes were transcribed at her behest by two scribes who worked under her close scrutiny and are remarkable in the picture that they present of her life as a comfortably-off medieval gentlewoman, and of her frequent pilgrimages both throughout England and abroad. The writing is unaffected and direct and tells us much about both her everyday and interior life, and her frequent mystical experiences which left her weeping copiously, leading to much hostility from those around her.

I get the impression that she would not have been an easy person to live with - she was seized not only with floods of tears (c/w moaning and loud wailing) but sudden desires to forgo meat and wine, wear only white clothing, attend confession on a very regular basis, and to live in a 'chaste marriage' with her long-suffering husband, John. He, unsurprisingly, is less keen on all of her enthusiasms but- to give him his due, he seems to have loved her, stuck up for her against her detractors and reached a cordial accommodation with her whims. Actually, she seems to have brought her own money to the marriage, so perhaps he had little say in it all. I'm about halfway through the book at the moment. Being Lent, it is indeed appropriate spiritual reading. I find that I am warming to her, although she is almost piteous in her determination to be seen as misunderstood. I think that she almost certainly had severe post-natal depression, not to say psychosis after the birth of her first child and that it was this that pre-disposed her to her mystical 'attacks'. I can truly sympathise with her in this. Following the birth of my third child there were a number of occasions where I really felt that I was losing my grip on reality and was subject to a number of inner locutions that d.g. lead me back to sanity, rather than in the opposite direction. Maybe it is the thinning of the psyche that primes people for mystical experiences, and how it is viewed depends on the recipient's willing acceptance, or revulsion, of the supranormal.

Margery went on to have thirteen more children. I myself stopped at four.

Sweet Charity (Shops)

I seem to spend my life scuffling about in charity shops looking for books, don't I? Well, that's because they're so cheap there. But I have noticed a price heirarchy even amongst these. Here is my report on book prices in the charity shops of York, starting with the most expensive first.

1) Oxfam: it has two dedicated bookshops in York, plus one general clothes/brick-a-brack shop with a sizeable book section. Good range of books, shelved in categories, fiction subdivided as classics/popular/sci-fi/crime etc, then sorted alphabetically by author. Textbooks/non-fiction tends to be somewhat outdated. Small section first editions/collector's items. Good children's section. The price for a paperback is generally £2.99 -£3.49 depending on perceived poularity.

2) The Heart Foundation: Good selection of popular literature, sorted alphabetically by author; smaller selection of non-fiction, mostly outdated. Some 'collector's items. I bought a fairly tatty Penguin Classics edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls for £1.50 here. Most paperback fiction c. the same price as Oxfam.

3) Scope: I don't tend to go in here much, the books are very run of the mill stuff (Dan Brown, Aga-sagas) plus much outdated non-fiction. And they're always pestering you to buy raffle tickets.

4) Mind: A reasonable number of books at the back, subdivided into basic categories. Paperback fiction about £1.50-£2.99. Never seem to get much new stuff in. Small children's section.

5) Sue Ryder: started off with quite a lot of stock, both fiction and non-fiction, at reasonable prices -about the same as Mind, some of them obviously quite new.. Book shelves are getting smaller though. Pity.

6) The Autism Society: lots of pot-boilers, but redeemed themselves in my eyes by having a sale where all books were 50p. I bought Oliver Sack's 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat' and Peter Hoeg's 'Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow'. Still to be read.

6) PDSA: Books generally divided just into paperback or hardback. All books £1 at the moment, except for a few 'collector's items' which are £3. I bought Farrar's 'Life of Christ' here last week.

7) Save The Children: very small shop, but proportionally large book shelf. Good turnover. Prices fluctuate, but fairly decent paperback fiction is generally around the £1.50-£2.00 mark.

8) Age Concern: fusty little section at the back of the shop. Not much stock, but reasonable turnover. Top price seems to be £1.50 for a paperback. Bought an Oxford Classics text of Wilkie Collins 'The Woman in White' for 50p.

9) Help the Aged: seems to have stopped caring about its bookshelves. Lots of dross - romance and war, but the odd gem. Just bought Penguin Classics version of 'The Book of Margery Kempe' for 59 pence. More of this anon.

Also to be mentioned are the Red Cross Shop, The Cat's Protection League, the Woodlands shop and the St Leonard's Hospice shop: they tend to have a small and generally poor selection books. I almost never go in, and when I do there's seldom anything I want.

Biblio-stalking

Spooky really......As I wrote in my last post, I find myself gradually acquiring the works of the theological author Frederic William Farrar (left). Farrar was a child of the British Empire, born in Bombay in 1831, educated initially in the Isle of Wight, then at King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge. Over the years he rose from a humble schoolmaster to become the Dean of Canterbury - he is often referred to simply as Dean Farrar. His theological writings were copious - he was a humane and catholic scholar who believed, along with the church father Origen that no-one could be disqualified from redemption. Well, having purchased his 'Early Days of Christianity' just the other day, imagine my surprise when in the PDSA charity shop, there on the shelves amid the knick-knacks and single sherry glasses lay.....Farrar's 'Life of Christ', illustrated with engravings by the pre-Raphaelite artist Holman Hunt (he who painted 'The Light of the World' that hangs in St Paul's cathedral in London). Marvelling at such spooky serendipity, I took it to the counter where, for £3, it became part of my burgeoning collection.

I'll admit that his writings will certainly not be to all tastes - he is typical of the Victorian writer who writes with a great deal of sentiment and feels quite free to interpret facts and assert psychological motive. Neither is he averse to purple prose. But I rather enjoy it - it is a refreshing change from academic prose which, in its struggle to be factual and fair, often ends up as flat, dull and dry as dust. Who could resist a writer who writes

'It was natural that there should be some stir in the little household at the coming of such a Guest, and Martha, the busy, eager-heartyed, affectionate hostess, "on hospitable thoughts intent", hurried to and fro, and was distracted with excited energy to prepare for His proper entertainment. Her sister Mary, too, was anxious to receive him fittingly, but her notions of the reverence due to Him were of a different kind. Knowing that her sister was only too happy to do all that could be done for His material comfort, she, in deep humility, sat at His feet and listened to His words.'?