Scholarship for Everyone: How to use Google Translate

I happened upon Google Translate by accident but now it is clear it was a happy accident. Let’s say you are writing an article and you have a foreign language source that you need a rough translation. If you scan the foreign language source as a RTF (rich text format) then you will be able to feed that into the translation window of Google Translate. You are able to do some tweaking of the Google translation on the website.  You must get a good clear scan. However you will want to clean it up, how much will depend on you, in a regular word processor, WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, or Open Office.  Some of you will no doubt say this is still cumbersome; however it is much less cumbersome than attaining real fluency in foreign languages.

Hebrew Poetry: Reading in a Cultured Space in an Age of Anxiety

Age of anxiety is a popular meme. A meme is an idea, belief or belief system or pattern that can be replicated. The word meme derives from the Greek word something imitated. Richard Dawkins the British evolutionary biologist coined the term on his book the Selfish Gene (1976) according to Wikipedia. Memes can be propagated in many ways. Malcolm Gladwell describes connectors, mavens, and sales men and women as vehicles of meme propagation in his book Tipping Point (2000). Today there is also the Internet meme

W.H. Auden, author of The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947) coined the phrase according to Wikipedia. Auden’s Pulitzer Prize winning poem (1948) inspired a Leonard Bernstein symphony “Age of Anxiety by the same name and a Jerome Robbins ballet (1950). Alan Watts used this concept as the title of the first chapter of his book Wisdom of Insecurity (1951).

Clergy even examine this meme. Nancy E. Petty preached the sermon “The Age of Anxiety” with Matthew 6:24-34 as the text. It is easy to understand the rise of Christianity amidst an age of anxiety.  M. Scott Peck used this meme in his book The Road Less Travelled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety.

For some anxiety is a psychological state. For instance Andrea Tone in her book The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers.  American Science in an Age of Anxiety by Jessica Ward,

You can look at this meme form the perspective of political science.  Clarence A. Glasrud The Age of Anxiety published in 1960 by Houghton Mifflin was one of the earliest treatments.  At the turn of the millennium Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter edited a collection of essays on the Age of Anxiety. Zero-Sum Future: American Power in and Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman   another political science approach is found in the work of Jane Parish and Martin Parker edited a collection of essays The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and Human Sciences. Hope in the Age of Anxiety: A Guide to Understanding and Strengthening Out Most Important Virtue by Anthony Scioli and Henry B. Biller, Haynes Johnson, The Age of Anxiety: McCarthyism to Terrorism.

In future posts I will investigate what we mean when we say anxiety but for today I want to paraphrase Bowen and Friedman on anxiety. Friedman in his book, published posthumously A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix contends that the age of the quick fix is an expression of anxiety. Hence we might say that the age of the quick fix is also the age of anxiety according to Friedman.  The book was edited by Margaret M. Treadwell and Edward W. Beal of the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family.

Probably one of the most insightful plays on this “age of anxiety” meme is  a blog post by Michael Jinkins who compares this age to the years before the Protestant Reformation. I will recommend Jinkins’ The Church Faces Death: Ecclesiology in a Post-Modern Context which frames many of the same issues but form the perspective of the transitions from ecclesiastical life framed by modernity and the emerging post-modern horizons for the church.

 

Thinking about Zion’s History in the Psalms

I am reading J.J.M. Roberts work on Davidic and the Psalter. “J.J. M. Roberts “The Davidic Origin of the Zion Tradition” originally published in JBL 92 (1973) 329-44. Also in The Bible and the Ancient Near East Eisenbrauns 2002.

His claim: The Zion material begin during the Davidic-Solomonic period.

One of the things you notice when you read or reread this article is how much the terrain has shifted since 1973. Roberts was arguing against a pre-Israelite Zion tradition.
Edzard Rohland and Gunther Wanke He properly observed that the weakness of this poisition was that it depended on the “unproven and unprovable assumptions about Jebusite role in Davidic Jerusalem.” (314)
“…if the Zion tradition goes back to the pre-Israelite inhabitants of Jerusalem, and particularly to the cult of El, that tradition should be compatible with the extra-biblical traditions about this Canaanite deity. However, such is not the case.” (316) For instance the mythological topography of Zion do not match.
“There is no reason to believe the Jebusites would have fused the separate mythological traditions of EL and Baal.” (321)
While Roberts refutes a pre-Israelite  Zion tradition he does think that Ps 110:4-5 indicates that “traditions about Melchizedek is unquestionably pre-Israelite. But as they say on television that is a different show.
Roberts says about what he is doing in this essay. “So far this paper has attempted to show that one cannot derive the Zion tradition form the pre-Israelite cult of Jerusalem. …I suggest that all the features in the Zion tradition can be explained  most adequately by positing an original Sitz im Leben in the era of the Davidic-Solomonic empire.” (324)
The Psalms texts in play are Pss 46:5; 47:3; 83:19; 97:9 and Ps 82.
Roberts is leading us  to a major methodological direction. “Politico-religious propaganda has never been overly concerned with keeping its mythology straight.” The rise of the Davidic “empire” provides the impetus for the creation of Zion tradition. This process may have borrowed form Canaanite mythology.
Nonetheless Roberts rightly says: “Religious ideology often outlives the political realities it was in part  created to justify.” (329)