Lots of Interesting Reads
Review of new book on the King James translation.
Adam Nicolson has a great deal of fun with the absurdities of subsequent translations, all of which is quite deserved; the 18th-century translator who replaced Peter’s ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here’ with ‘Oh, sir! What a delectable residence we might establish here!’, or the insanity of the New English Bible, improving the simple and beautiful ‘Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and yee shall finde’ into ‘Shoot the net to starboard, and you will make a catch.’ These bathetic and inadequate updatings are very funny, but it is important to understand why they are so hopeless. The King James Bible came to demonstrate and embody the principles of expressive English, and any deviation from it can never hope to rival its beauty and perfection.
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NY Times review of book on early Christian thinkers, aka the Fathers.
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WSJ opines on the Pope.
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Eye-opening piece from Bernard Lewis.
[It was] often expressed by Osama bin Laden, among others, that America was a paper tiger. Muslim terrorists had been driven by such beliefs before. One of the most surprising revelations in the memoirs of those who held the American Embassy in Teheran from 1979 to 1981 was that their original intention had been to hold the building and the hostages for only a few days. They changed their minds when statements from Washington made it clear that there was no danger of serious action against them. They finally released the hostages, they explained, only because they feared that the new President, Ronald Reagan, might approach the problem "like a cowboy."
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