WHICH IS TO MISUNDERSTAND IT AS AN ADULT:

5 Bible Stories You Definitely Misunderstood as a Kid (Taylor Berry, Feb. 10th, 2025, Relevant)

3. The Tower of Babel Wasn’t Just About People Building Too High
   For some reason, this story always got distilled down to something about people trying to build a really tall tower, as if God’s issue was just an ancient version of zoning laws. The real issue? Human arrogance and a desire for self-sufficiency apart from God.

The people of Babel weren’t just ambitious architects; they wanted to create a society where they didn’t need God. The tower wasn’t just an impressive skyscraper—it was a declaration of independence from divine authority. God confusing their language wasn’t just some random punishment; it was a way of protecting them from their own pride.

Essentially, the story is less about construction mishaps and more about what happens when humanity tries to build something great while ignoring the One who made them great in the first place.

Nope. Just as when He banished us from Eden, the Tower is another example of God’s fear that we will become as Him:

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

ABSOLUTION:

The Ledge: How the true story of three lives lost at sea in December 1956 became Maine’s most famous short story. (Edgar Allen Beem, December 2012, Down East)

On December 27, 1956, a hunting party of five set out from Ash Point in South Harpswell to go gunning for ducks between Eagle Island and West Brown Cow Island. Only two made it home alive.

Fisherman Lawrence C. Estes, Jr., known to one and all as Buster, skippered his boat the Amy E. with son Steven, 13, son Maurice, 12, nephew Harry Jewell, 16, and fellow fisherman Everett Gatchell on board. The thirty-seven-foot lobsterboat, named for Estes’ wife, towed a pair of skiffs.

Near Eagle Island, Estes dropped Gatchell and son Maurice off in one rowboat. They intended to row ashore and hunt from Eagle Island, but the rough winter seas made a landing too dangerous, so Gatchell and the boy spent a chilly day shooting from the skiff.

Buster Estes and the other two boys motored on out across Broad Sound, anchored the Amy E. near West Brown Cow, and rowed to the half-tide ledge known as Mink Rock. The seaweed-covered ledge is under four to five feet of water at high tide, but it makes an excellent perch for cormorants, seals, and duck hunters when exposed. After the fact, it became apparent that the Estes’ little skiff must somehow have drifted away, leaving him and the two boys marooned on the ledge as the freezing tide was coming in. All three perished.

No one knows what actually happened on Mink Rock that day, but the late author and Bowdoin professor Lawrence Sargent Hall built his literary career on his imaginings in his short story, “The Ledge,” one of the most famous stories in the annals of Maine writing. First published in the Hudson Review in 1959, “The Ledge” was selected as the best American short story of the year in Prize Stories 1960: The O.Henry Awards and has subsequently appeared in close to forty anthologies.

THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION:

The revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment (Miles Smith, January 31, 2025, Washington Examiner)

Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Republican and one of the leading architects of the amendment, believed he was participating in a revolution of the slaveholding South and in broader American society. “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed,” said Stevens, “and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic.”

People often don’t realize the revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment, and conservatives in particular downplay its revolutionary nature. American historians have for a long time treated the actions of the Republican Party, and the ending of slavery in particular, as a modest but nonetheless substantive political and social revolution.

Allan Nevins, whose eight-volume history of the sectional crisis and the Civil War won a string of awards in the middle of the 20th century, called the Civil War a revolution, as did Pulitzer-winning historian James McPherson, author of the 1989 book Battle Cry of Freedom, which is perhaps still the single best history of the Civil War. In fact, it’s hard to see how the Civil War and the abolition of slavery did not remake the United States.

The understandable desire to protect the legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and the tendency to view the Constitution as an almost sacred document that created an exceptional nation, are powerful but not always historically helpful ways to conceive of the 13th Amendment and the other two Reconstruction amendments. While slavery did not create the American republic, the Constitution undoubtably tolerated ownership of human chattel.

We did not Reconstruct hard enough.

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

If oysters be the food of love, shuck on: Tom Parker Bowles searches for the ultimate ‘jiggy jiggy juice’ (Tom Parker-Bowles, November 7, 2024, Country Life)

I remember a trip to Hong Kong, a couple of decades back, where I found myself in Kowloon’s ‘Snake Alley’, a tiny backstreet known for its reptilian delights. The walls of this particular restaurant were fitted with dozens of small glass cases, each containing a cobra, all of which eyed me with beady disdain. Once I’d selected my dinner, the furious serpent was removed from its home and languidly proffered before me. After I’d nodded my (terrified) approval, its head was lopped off, the body chopped up and simmered in a soup, as the bile duct and blood were drained into a shot of baijiu, which I had to down in one. The spirit was so potent that I could taste nothing but fire. Once I’d opened my eyes and just about recovered, the owner punched me on the shoulder. ‘Your lady very lucky tonight,’ he whispered with a lascivious grin. Then he pumped his fist, just to hammer the message home. There was, I hasten to add, no effect whatsoever. Just like every other so-called ‘aphrodisiac’.

Some ingredients do, admittedly, possess nutrients that may help the wannabe lothario. At a push. We all know that the Venetian Casanova gobbled oysters by the dozen and, not only do they look fairly suggestive, all soft, seductive folds of flesh, but they also contain zinc, which can speed up testosterone production. Dark chocolate is rich in a compound called phenylalanine, which boosts mood and, they say, the libido, too. Bananas are bursting with potassium, bromelain and B vitamins, all essential for reproductive hormones, whereas pomegranates have lots of lusty antioxidants. Yet you’d have to consume all of the above in such vast quantities that you’d eat yourself into a stupor — which hardly makes for a night of unbridled passion.

Every country and culture has its own form of ‘jiggy jiggy juice’.

iDENTITY PRECLUDES THE nEW cOMMANDMENT:

The Rise of the Right-Wing Exvangelical (Jake Meador, 1/31/25, Mere Orthodoxy)

[W]e are now seeing the emergence of what might be called “right exvangelicalism.” If left exvangelicals sought to keep Jesus but dispense with the church, right exvangelicals are following a similar trajectory, but from the other side of the political spectrum. This causes the right exvangelical to end up mirroring the left exvangelical, as it were: Start with right-wing politics circa 2025 and then come to Christianity after you’ve already committed to the political vision of the American right. But whereas this move caused left exvangelicals to keep a proxy of Jesus and dispense with the church, it is causing right exvangelicals to keep a proxy of the church and dispense instead with Jesus. The church can stay as a vehicle for promoting civic religion, for insuring that Christian moral norms are given deference within the culture, and as a way of inculcating the kind of moral vision they seek to enact, particularly as it relates to sex and gender and “common culture.” Jesus’s place, however, is far more ambiguous.

Minimally, one can observe a pattern of behavior amongst right exvangelicals defined by a tendency to condemn many Christian moral norms. Humility and meekness is now “loser theology,” it would seem, and the Sermon on the Mount is leftist drivel. The only Jesus preserved in their conception of the faith seems to be the Jesus of the Second Coming who returns in judgment. The Jesus of the Gospels, “strong and kind” in the words of a song my kids sang for their Christmas program once, is notably absent.

KERMIT WEPT:

The Art of Frogging (Michael McIntosh, Jan 27, 2025, Sports Classics Daily)

I can’t decide whether to think about catching frogs as hunting, fishing or something else. There is more than one way to skin those particular cats. I’ve shot them with a .22, caught them on fishing rods, gigged them, and simply grabbed them as they sat looking dour and self-satisfied.

Shooting frogs certainly is effective, but not all that much fun, and I don’t care to shoot bullets around water. Gigging requires a bit more skill and stealth; you don’t throw the gig like a spear, but rather reach out and stick them, so you have to get close. Grabbing can be hair-raising at times. More on that later. Force me to choose a single approach and I’d have to go for a fishing rod. More on that later, too.

However you do it, frogging is largely a nocturnal affair, at least in my mind. They’re out and about during the day, of course, but those are targets of opportunity. Serious frogging always raises for me images of clear, starry skies on sultry summer nights. In Missouri, where I lived for nearly 30 years, the frog season opened on July 1. If there’s a more miserable time of year to be outdoors, I couldn’t name it. Heat and humidity do not combine into an environment that’s comfortable to me. But the prospect of frogs makes up for the sweat.

Probably the oldest form of frogging is simply grabbing them as they sit on a riverbank or the shore of a pond.

DON’T EVEN WANT TO KNOW WHAT CANDYLAND REPRESENTS:

Curious questions: Where did the Snakes and Ladders board game come from? (Rob Crossan, 2/8/25, Country Life)

Absurd as it may sound to our ears, historians contend that Snakes and Ladders was originally designed to teach us about liberation from the transmutations of karma, with the winner being rewarded with moksha; namely emancipation from the endless cycle of death and rebirth.

Known as Moksha Patam, the game in its original form was intended to teach children about the Hindu philosophies of both Karma causality — centred around committing good or bad deeds — and Samskara, which are ritual life events.

The game sounded a lot more sinister back then. The snakes sent players tumbling into the clutches of power-hungry demigods, asuras, whereas the ladders, thankfully, allowed participants to clamber closer to God or one of the Hindu variants of Heaven known as Kailasa, Vaikuntha and Brahmaloka.

CHOICE FOR ME, NOT FOR THEE:

Fusionism and the Problem of Order (Kevin Vallier, February 5, 2025, Religion & Liberty)

free-market capitalism, in tandem with other free institutions, help build community. They do this by creating the material abundance required for communities to flourish. But free-markets do not promote community merely by creating wealth. They also allow for the formation of virtue, given that virtue can only arise under conditions of freedom.

Fusionists see the local and the national as separate but complementary social domains. The civic domain contains local institutions like churches and families, which provide the social capital required for a free-market order. The national economic domain creates prosperity and, rightly ordered, does not undermine valuable local customs.

The New Right disagrees. Market forces are a solvent of tradition. If we allow unconstrained markets, communal bonds and traditional ways of life will wither, and our culture will become crude and commercialized.

As the old Mencken definition has it: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” MAGA is a function of the fear that someone, somewhere makes different choices than you do. And republican liberty requires that choices can only be banned via particapatory processes and then must apply universally. MAGA can’t achieve its goals by way of the former and thinks its members should be absolved from the latter.

FOR WANT OF A FISH…:

Missouri’s Great Escaped Snake Scare of 1953 (Thomas Gounley, April 21, 2016, Atlas Obscura)

In 1953, Springfield, Missouri, was a city of about 65,000 people and at least 11 escaped Indian cobras slithering loose on the streets.

Between August and October, at least 11 of the snakes were either killed or captured in Springfield, much to the alarm of residents, many of whom fought back with a common gardening tool.

While a local pet shop was always suspected to be the source of the snakes, its owner denied any involvement. It would be 35 years until the person who set the reptiles free came forward.

TOP OF THE WORLD:

 REVIEW: of Doc Watson: A Life in Music by Eddie Huffman (James Ruchala, 1/27/25, Open Letters Review)

Despite becoming blind by his first birthday, growing up in one of the poorest areas of the nation, and relying on government support until middle age, Doc Watson became one of the most influential guitar players of the twentieth century. Watson could “bridge the gap” between the traditional Appalachian tunes he learned from family and neighbors and the music popular with modern urban audiences. As one early manager explained: “While some [folk] singers yowled like a rusty hinge or a deer tangled in a barbed-wire fence, Doc hummed like a well-tuned engine or a purring cat.” His recordings as both a guitar player and a singer are some of the warmest and most accessible to come out of the revival of interest in traditional American folk music forms that started in the early 1960s.