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If you arrived here directly, then don't miss Holford Web Home of David's Mental Meanderings If you just want to find out who this strange bloke is, you'll need to go there as well. Your feedback about anything you read here is always welcome. Other blogs I enjoy reading: Doxos St. Stephen's Musings Robert's Cogitations This is Life Paradosis Natalie Solent Mere Comments Little Geneva Antioch Road The Edge of England's Sword flyingchair.net Samizdata Joshua Claybourn Between Heaven and Hell PC Watch Notes From a Hillside Farm Simeon's Hit and Miss of Filosofical Thought George Grant Lileks a conservative blog for peace You can also find me listed at Blogs4God Currently down from the bookshelf: Celtic Christianity in Early Medieval Wales: The Origins of the Welsh Spiritual Tradition by Oliver Davies Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium by Judith Herrin Recently finished: Give Me My Father's Body: The Life of Minik, The New York Eskimo by Kenn Harper John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life by Paul C. Nagel Lancaster & York: The Wars of the Roses by Alison Weir Most recent acquisitions: John Major: The Autobiography Retreat from New Jerusalem: British Politics 1951-64 by Kevin Jefferys 
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Saturday, May 24, 2003
I have recently come to the shocking realisation that I have not read the whole Bible. I suppose I�ve known this in theory, but it only just hit me. Before I became Orthodox (or was convinced of Orthodoxy), I thought that I had. I had read the whole thing cover to cover when I was twelve years old. Okay, it was the Living Bible, but still no small feat for a twelve-year-old to accomplish in eight months and nine days. (I started on March 20 and finished on November 29.) And I�ve read lots of it since. But what I read has only been considered the whole Bible for less than 500 years, and then by only a fraction of Christians. Why the Protestant Reformers decided to use just the Hebrew Old Testament is unclear. It may have been that there was stuff in the other bits they didn�t like. But whatever the reason, all Protestant Bibles have left out twelve books and bits of others that the Eastern Church has been using all along. The Orthodox canon is based upon the Septuagint, the Old Testament used by the early Church. However, to accept only the Hebrew canon (which wasn�t established as the Jewish canon until well after the time of Christ) is to say that God didn�t provided His Word to His Church for the 1500 years before the Protestant Reformation. So Jesus must have been lying when He said that Holy Spirit would guide the Church in all truth. What He must have meant was that the Holy Spirit would guide the Church in some truth for the first millennium and a half. For three-fourths of the Church�s existence, it read all of the books of the Old Testament as Holy Scripture. Most of the Church still does. Now I have to rework the cadence of rattling off the books of the Bible in order � something that goes back to my childhood days in the Baptist Church. I�ll have to revisit the Sword Drills of Sunday night Training Union, this time flipping instantly to Tobit or II Maccabees. I�ll be very glad when they finally get the full Orthodox Study Bible off the presses. Reliable sources tell me that I�ll have to wait until at least 2005. It looks like I have a lot of catching up to do. Friday, May 23, 2003
Today I have made some changes to the left of your screen. I have added links to two more Orthodox bloggers: Clifton D. Healy's This is Life: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis and James Ferrenberg's Paradosis. I have also followed the example of some and included information about my offline reading. You know, the kind where you have to actually hold something and turn the pages. I do a bit of this. Not as much as I should, I'm sure, but with parenting, husbanding, blogging, and DMOZ meta editing, there's not a lot of time left. Books are mostly reserved for those times when Mrs Holford is looking online for new sewing patterns or deals on eBay. And of course for visits to the "Sitting Room". Now to the news� The Government has botched so many things that I just don�t know where to start. But today, class, we�ll look at education. The last Education Secretary was so bad even she admitted it and resigned. She presided over the A levels fiasco and I didn�t think it could get any worse. Charlie Clarke has proven that it can and has. It is disputed as to whether he no use for historians or others that apparently don�t benefit the economy. He may or may not have suggested that they should not be funded by the State. (For American readers: all universities in the UK are funded by the State.) What is not in dispute is that he has created a funding shortage in primary and secondary education. For all of Labour�s talk of spending more money on education, school are suddenly in a shortfall. There is already a shortage of teachers. They are creating all sorts of incentives to get more teachers. Now at the same time, they are making the teachers they have redundant. It looks like 3000 teachers across the country may get their P45s (kind of like a W-2, handed out upon leaving employment) by the end of this month. One school in Croydon has a �500,000 shortfall and is having to send student home early to save money. Even though it still leaves him �80,000 in the red, the head teacher is firing six teachers, increases the size of classes, cutting books and class materials, and cancelling school trips. And it�s not just money that�s the problem. When it came to power in 1997, the Government set a target that 85% of 11-year-olds would meet set standards in math and English by 2004. When last year�s target of 80% wasn�t met last year, the Education Secretary resigned (after having weathered the A levels scandal). Mr Clarke isn�t about to follow in her footsteps out of the Cabinet. He has decided that the best way to keep his job is to simply abolish the targets. In an amazing turnabout for a Government that believes it always knows best, Charlie has told the schools to set their own targets so that the Government�s aborted level is reached �as soon as possible�. But it isn�t just 11-year-olds who are thicker than molasses on a cold morning. Because the Government wants to send everyone to University, they have dropped standards to the floor in a hope of scooping up anyone with the slightest inkling for higher education. They are making up the easiest possible degrees to get them graduated. What�s the resulting assessment of university dons? They have called the students currently walking the hallowed hall of learning the worst in living memory. Thursday, May 22, 2003
There are so many news items about which I could blog. Perhaps I'll save them for tomorrow. Today in Parenting 101 we learned about icons, but not how we expected. My parents left for Texas yesterday. Aidie and I took them to the train bound for Gatwick, from whence they departed this morning. I could tell that he didn't understand what was going on when they boarded the train and the doors shut and it pulled away from the station. He probably didn't think it was any different than Papa going out for a walk. When he got up this morning, he went looking for Papa and couldn't figure out why he wasn't around. Then he went into his bedroom, where they had been staying, looking for Honey (what we have called my mother since I was 18 months old) -- no doubt because she always fed him toast. All day he kept climbing up on the window sill looking out the window for their imminent return. He has been saying "Papa" for a while now, though he always says it in a whisper for some reason. He would wait until today before he would start to say "Honey". He kept saying both over and over and looking for them everywhere. Finally, this afternoon, he saw the picture we have of them holding him. It is in a frame on the dresser in the lounge, just out of his reach. He kept pointing at it, saying "Papa" until I got it down for him. Even though they are not here, he knows they are represented in the picture. Well, he doesn't understand what representation is. Yet he definitely knows that the people in the picture are the people he loves. He wouldn't let go over the frame. And he wouldn't stop kissing the picture. He would distinctly kiss both Papa and Honey. When we asked him, "Where's Honey?" he would touch her image. Likewise with "Where's Papa?". In kissing the picture, he wasn't kissing the glass covering the photographic paper. He was kissing his grandparents. Kelly was the first to grasp what he was doing. She said, "That's icons!" She realised that he had never seen us kissing photos before. It was an innate response. She also realised that kissing is the innate and natural thing for us to do when we see icons. That's exactly what we are doing when we kiss icons. They too are our family. They are our fathers and mothers in the faith. In kissing their picture, we are kissing them because we love them. Just like Papa and Honey, they aren't with us anymore, but they are just as alive in a different place. Heaven may even be closer than Texas. (With all due respect to those readers who remain convinced they are one and the same place, I hope heaven is cooler in the summertime.) And just like Papa and Honey, we will see them again. Probably not as soon, but one day. Until we see our fathers and mothers among the saints, we will kiss their picture. And until he sees Papa and Honey again, I'm sure Aidie will kiss theirs. Wednesday, May 21, 2003
Today its back to the usual problems with the most incompetent Government to ever elected by a free people. In its infinite wisdom, the Government keeps changing the tax system. First, they introduced Working Families Tax Credit. Then they abolished that and created the Working Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit. The Government ran a big campaign to get everyone to apply for the new scheme. Everyone did. Of course the Government didn�t hire any people to handle this workload. The people they did have are completely clueless. You think I�m using hyperbole. I�m not. They are completely and totally incompetent. When you can get them on the phone, that is. And you have to get them on the phone, because it seems they have lost every application that has been sent in. They lost ours and those of over 500,000 people who have not had their forms processed. Mrs Holford tries to reach them on the phone everyday without success. The one time she got through, they said she had sent it to the wrong desk, even though that is where she was told to send it. And apparently, no one could go to where she sent it and retrieve it. The Times has reported today that the 500,000 people who have not been paid may be entitled to compensation. Seems that the Paymaster General mentioned this in the fine print of a House of Commons Treasury Committee report. Mrs Holford has not taken her frustration to the point that Mike Maddison of Enmore, Somerset has. He lost his job because he need the tax credit money to be able to afford to drive to work. After weeks of trying to get through on the phone, he finally got through to someone who told him to watch his bank account for the money. They he got a letter asking for the details of his company car. In Mr Maddison�s words, �How could an assembly-floor worker have a company car? I decided then that enough was enough.� The police had wanted to arrest him for breach of the peace, but the Inland Revenue staff urged them not to do so, as they feared the publicity would incite copycat incidents. Maddison may have been disappointed, because it was his intention to get arrested and embarrass the Inland Revenue. The Government, by the way, never wavers from its denial that the system is in a state of chaos. Tuesday, May 20, 2003
I�m sorry I�ve been so long finishing my thoughts about what is good about Britain and getting the last �S� posted. This has been the last few days of my parents� visit, plus I�ve had to put together a presentation. What�s great about Britain? There�s scenery, sustenance, and� Saints. If you have an eye for such things, you really don�t have to go far in any direction to come across places associated with those venerable fathers and mothers who have walked this island before us. It was raining yesterday when we were out with my parents and it prevented us from visiting Llanthony Priory. Llanthony (pronounced llan-tony� with that Welsh ll sound) is actually a contraction of Llan Dewi Nant Honddu, or �church of St David on the Honddu brook�. Dewi is the Welsh word for David. It was built on the site of St David�s monastic cell. Yes, the St David, before he moved out to West Wales and founded the monastic community around which the village and cathedral of St David�s eventual developed. But Llanthony is where St David spent a lot of time fasting and praying and getting serious with God. Holiness so permeated this place that five hundred years later, when Sir William de Lacy was out hunting and came across the spot, he immediately laid down his sword and renounced the world. He dedicated himself to prayer and fasting. A couple of years later, at the behest of Queen Maud�s chaplain, he founded a monastery on the site, which eventually houses about forty Augustinian monks. Llanthony is about 25 miles from here. But only 10 miles from here is a church on the site of the first church founded by the father of Welsh monasticism, St Dyfrig. It was St Dyfrig who elevated St David to the episcopate. At two different locations in Herefordshire he trained over a thousand missionaries. Long before I moved to Herefordshire, I adopted St Dyfrig as a patron and he is the patron of our family. When Mrs Holford was in labour 16 months ago, it was to St Dyfrig�s Church that I went to pray. These are but two little examples within a few miles of here. I could go on and on with more, but the point is that amidst this heathen land, there are still holy places. They are ignored for the most part, because they don�t appeal to the modern tourist. There�s nothing exciting about most of these places � not all of them are as scenically beautiful as Llanthony. There may only be a few stones to mark where they are, and sometimes not even that. But they have been sanctified by the holy prayers of holy men and the power of the Holy Spirit. For me this has more substance than either the scenery or the sustenance this island has to offer. |