Looting Mesopotamian artifacts

One of the cover stories in the news the past few days has been the looting of antiquities in the Iraq Museum. One of the pictures in the LA Times' article yesterday was of the so-called Ram Caught in the Thicket, found by Sir Leonard Woolley in the royal tombs of Ur. I saw the University of Pennsylvania Museum Near East section's traveling exhibit The Royal Tombs of Ur a few years ago when it was in the LA area. The Ram was one of the prominent artifacts. This CNN article has an interactive display of more of the exhibit.

I don't know if the exhibit is still here in the States or if some of the artifacts were sent back to Iraq as the picture in the LA Times article suggests.

(A very readable book about the early days of archaeology in Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South America, including the many colorful characters, is Gods, Graves, & Scholars: The Story of Archaeology by C. W. Ceram.)

Not tired

I think I'm still a bit out of kilter from the change to daylight saving time. It's after 10:30 and I'm not even tired. Maybe I'm just so pleased at having done my taxes this afternoon. Lesson for the current tax year: start putting receipts and making notations in the 2003 income tax file now.

But tomorrow is a full day and the beginning of a packed week, so off to bed I go.

Prayer and work

From Life Together (Gemeinsames Leben) by Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

In work the Christian learns to allow [herself] to be limited by the task, and thus for [her] the work becomes a remedy against the indolence and sloth of the flesh....But this can happen only where the Christian breaks through the "it" [work] to the "Thou," which is God, who bids [her] work and makes that work a means of liberation from [herself].

The work does not cease to be work; on the contrary, the hardness and rigor of labor is really sought only by the one who knows what it does for [her]. The continuing struggle with the "it" remains. But at the same time the break-through is made; the unity of prayer and work, the unity of the day is discovered....

Then from this achieved unity of the day the whole day acquires an order and a discipline. These must be sought and found in the morning prayer and in work they will be maintained. The prayer of the morning will determine the day. Wasted time, which we are ashamed of, temptations that beset us, weakness and listlessness in our work, disorder and indiscipline in our thinking and our relations with other people very frequently have their cause in neglect of the morning prayer....Decisions which our work demands will be simpler and easier when they are made, not in the fear of men, but solely in the presence of God....Our strength and energy for work increase when we have prayed God to give us the strength we need for our daily work (pp. 70, 71; emphasis mine).

Food and the Bible, part II

See the earlier post today for (personal) background. Here's an initial bibliography:

Food
Reed, Stephen Alan. "Food in the Psalms." Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1986.

Knierim, Rolf P. "Food, Land, and Justice." In The Task of Old Testament Theology. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995.

Cosmos, Nature, Environment
Leopold, Aldo. "The Forestry of the Prophets." In The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays by Aldo Leopold, ed. Susan L. Flader and J. Baird Callicott, 71-77. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Repr. from Journal of Forestry 18 (1920): 412-419.

Spring, David and Ellen, eds. Ecology and Religion. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974. (Includes reprints of "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" by Lynn White, Jr. and "Man and Nature: The Ecological Controversy and the Old Testament" by James Barr.)

Steck, Odil Hannes. World and Environment. Biblical Encounter Series. Nashville: Abingdon, 1980.

Knierim, Rolf P. "Cosmos and History in Israel's Theology." In The Task of Old Testament Theology. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995. Repr. from Horizons in Biblical Theology 3 (1981): 59-123.

Lamberty, Brett D. "Natural Cycles in Ancient Israel's View of Reality." Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate School, 1986.

Rolston, Holmes, III. Science and Religion: A Critical Survey. New York: Random House, 1987.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Gaia & God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

Gilkey, Langdon. Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: The Nexus of Science and Religion. Theology and the Sciences. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

Attfield, Robin, and Andrew Belsey, eds. Philosophy and the Natural Environment. Vol. 36, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Habel, Norman C. The Land is Mine: Six Biblical Land Ideologies. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.

Habel, Norman C., and Shirley Wurst, eds. The Earth Story in Genesis. Vol. 2, The Earth Bible. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press; Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2000.

Habel, Norman C., ed. The Earth Story in the Psalms and the Prophets. Vol. 4, The Earth Bible. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press; Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2001.

Kellert, Stephen R., and Timothy J. Farnham, eds. The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World. Washington: Island Press, 2002.

Wallace, Mark I. Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 2002.

Food and the Bible, part I

I just got back from picking up salad mix and broccoli at the Path to Freedom home. The "yard" or rather, garden, is beautiful. It's sunny and warm today. Butterflies were fluttering amongst the blooming plants. Their two cats were prancing around, chasing the butterflies and bumble bees, climbing the peach tree, and utterly enjoying the beautiful weather and garden.

Meeting the Path to Freedom family has prompted me to remember my growing up years in Zambia. I used to go with my mother early in the morning through the tall, wet grass to the hospital market where we bought extra produce that was grown in the hospital gardens to feed the patients. My parents also had gardens at our house. One was below the house by perpetual springs. The soil was very dark. Not far away you could hear the thumping of the mechanical rams that pumped water from the springs up to a holding tank, from which it was piped to houses.

The other garden was above the house. We also had lots of fruit trees: avocado; papaya; mulberry; tangerine; lemon; navel orange; guava; mango.

When I was very young, we kept chickens. However, the chickens attracted poisonous snakes, and my mother was afraid I'd get bitten. Even without the chickens, you still had to watch out for snakes. One of my favorite stories about my young sister and our dog, Cleo, who followed her everywhere, is about the time she was picking fruit (mulberries?). Suddenly Cleo dived into the bushes next to her feet, pulled out a puff adder, and tossed it into the air. Somebody who was nearby quickly killed it. Cleo was very protective of my sister. Whenever my mother wanted to know where my sister was, she would just call the dog, and from where ever the dog would come, she would know my sister was there.

Which brings me to the subject of food and the Bible. In traditional Christian theology, food isn't exactly a topic of much concern. However, it is a topic of great concern in the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament). I'm just beginning to ferret out studies that focus on food. I'm fortunate to be working with a professor who has paid attention to the subject of food and, more broadly, the environment or nature in the Hebrew Bible. (He has a garden in his back yard you can see from his study.) The start of a bibliography is in the next post.

Beating the blues

The weather turned grey, cloudy, and colder—and matches my outlook on things at the moment. There's just a lot to do: taxes, which are different this year and therefore need to be figured out; extra music for additional services at church during Lent, plus a memorial service tomorrow; and the rest of the list I've mentioned here too many times already. And, of course, the constant reminder that we're at war. I don't watch the news on television, not even PBS anymore. But I read the paper every few days, listen to the radio sometimes, and see the headlines on the internet.

Via one of the sites I came across when I was reading about grass-fed beef (April 1 below), eat wild by Jo Robinson, I found a site publicizing a book on which she collaborated, When Your Body Gets the Blues. The research was done, appropriately enough, by a professor at the Univ. of Washington School of Nursing. The results of the study of mildly depressed women determined that the following activities improved their outlook:

1. Walking outdoors at a brisk pace for 20 minutes, 5 or more days a week.
2. Greatly increasing their exposure to natural and artificial light during the daytime but decreasing their light exposure in the late evening hours.
3. Taking the following six vitamins and minerals in these doses: 50 mgs each of vitamins B-1, B-2, B-6; 400 mcg folic acid; 400 IU of vitamin D; and 200 mcg. selenium. (Most of these doses are higher than those found in one-a-day multi-vitamin tablets, but all are within safe limits.)

Very simple but effective.

One of the items sold at the online store reminded me of a once-upon-a-time fashion trend: bubble umbrellas.



I guess in Washington you have to try every trick possible to get as much light as you can!

Slow food

I was excited to read Corby Kummer's Food essay in the May Atlantic Monthly (not online yet): "Back to Grass." It's about cattle farmers who raise grass-fed beef, beef that is tastier, healthier and from cattle that are well-treated.

Ideally this refers to animals raised in open pastures and fed grass and silage all their lives after weaning. Grass feeding results in far lower levels of saturated fat and high levels of both omega-3 fatty acids...and the newest darling of the nutritional world—CLA (conjugated linoleic acid), polyunsaturated fat that may help prevent cancer. These benefits, and also higher levels of antioxidants, appear in all food from all animals that eat grass, milk and cheese as well as meat (p. 138).

Kummer points to the book Fast Food Nation and a New York Times article, to which I linked last April, as raising people's consciousness of the problems in the mass-produced, corn-fed beef industry. Kummer also profiles some farmers who raise grass-fed cattle, Tom and Dale Lasater, Tom Gamble and Bill Davies, and those associated with the New England Livestock Alliance.

Re: a related subject, Kummer has documented the Slow Food movement in his book The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavors, and Recipes. Here's an interview with Kummer about food and his book: "The Values of Good Food."

You traveled to Italy, Germany, Australia, and other countries in writing this book. How would you compare our attitudes about food—and about the type of values that Slow Food represents—with those of other countries?

I would say that the Europeans are pretty much converted already. In Europe almost everyone has memories going back over generations of food with actual flavor, food that's carefully raised. So Slow Food has appealed not just to rich people who like better things but to pretty much everybody who knows that there was once actually good food. Whether or not they can afford it, whether they feel they have time to make it, they know it's there, and that it's something to appreciate.

There's a real problem with Slow Food in America, and it's this: we don't have that memory bred into us, so it's still a movement of the elite. The goal is to get it to appeal much more to a grass-roots level, and that means making people taste it.