Roomin' House Blues

Diatessorn?  Don't bother running to your Oxford Dictionary for the meaning.  I have borrowed it from the title of a mid-second attempt to harmonize the four Gospel--causing deletions, confusion and lack of consistency, and missing the unique purpose of each Gospel--but in the positive creating an easy reference for the essentials of the story.  The Diatessorn (made of four ingredients) was composed by Tiatin, a Christian apologist and an Assyrian.  Inevitably, to harmonize the four, important parts of the Gospels were excluded,  and while consistent within itself, the consistency to the separate accounts is lost. The unique emphasis of each Gospel is muddled. As someone who has worked with religious films series and viewed many biblical films, I view the fact that most Gospel films draw on more than one Gospel account and sometimes non-biblical sources as a problem for the artistic and religious value of these films.  The harmonization of the Jesus stor...

Yesterday I was waiting for the bus and saw graffiti on the curb.  It's author, perhaps in despair or in bitterness had written, "Love is not real" in twisted black letters. I began to think of the state of mind of this unpoet (by which I mean he had no poetry, he was a rejector,  not a maker of beauty). I speculated on his history and his intent. Was he unlucky in love, or had he been unlucky enough to confuse desire with love? Was he rejecting Eros, playful love alone, or was he rejecting the entire moral code of society and God in one single scrawl. Pope Benedict wrote in a letter to mankind, a papal encyclical of how love can begin with the erotic love and as a couple grows more deeply into that love, raising children and becoming friends and life partners, that love can grow into a generalized love for all mankind and for God.  So if Benedict is right, and I believe him to be so, then it does not matter at what point in the contin...