Via MTV:

It deals extensively with souls — about keeping them whole and the evil required to split them in two. After one hero falls beyond the veil of life, his whispers are still heard. It starts with the premise that love can save you from death and ends with a proclamation that a sacrifice in the name of love can bring you back from it.

Harry Potter is followed by house-elves and goblins — not disciples — but for the sharp-eyed reader, the biblical parallels are striking. Author J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” books have always, in fact, dealt explicitly with religious themes and questions, but until “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” they had never quoted any specific religion.

It is wrong to claim that the Harry Potter series is “Christian” literature. It is equally wrong to fail to recognize the pervasive Christian imagery and themes J. K. Rowling weaves into her story. She may or may not be as devout or orthodox J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis (two other Brits who wrote about fantastic worlds were magic is real), but she has clearly drunk from the same spiritual streams.

(H/T: Scot McKnight)

Mark Liberman of Language Log asks, “Is a bad writing system a Good Thing?” He wonders whether there is a correlation between the difficulty of a language’s writing system and cultural and economic advancement.

There are some simple factors that will guarantee such a correlation: national languages that were recently reduced to writing tend to have historically shallow and rationally-designed orthographies; and the countries for which this is true tend to be relatively poor and underdeveloped, simply because otherwise their literacy traditions would have started many centuries earlier. In some cases, like Turkish, special circumstances permitted a recent and radical orthographic reform. Spanish seems simply to have lucked out, by having a fairly shallow and transparent system to start with, and then undergoing relatively few orthographically-opaque sound changes. But around the world, countries who came late to the table of literacy tend to have relatively transparent and easy-to-learn orthographies; and the same countries tend, for roughly the same reasons, to remain relatively undeveloped economically, to have relatively little cultural influence outside their borders, and so on.

You could go beyond these trivial historical associations, and make an argument that an unnecessarily complex and hard-to-learn writing system is genuinely and causally a Good Thing from a political and economic point of view.  According to this story, a crappy orthography — in a society where literacy matters — creates a meritocracy based on verbal aptitude and the willingness to work hard at difficult and arbitrary socially-prescribed tasks. Mastering the orthographic system is a necessary (and sometimes even sufficient) condition for economic success, and this tends to offer a path out of poverty to the bright and ambitious children of the masses, and  to create a handicap for the most lazy and stupid children of the elite. You could point to the Mandarin system in Tang-dynasty China, or the English “grammar schools” back in the days when they taught Latin and then a standardized form of English.

But not so fast. Mark continues to say,

I’m skeptical that this argument remains valid, if it was ever valid to start with. For one thing, there are now many gatekeeper subjects that are more intrinsically useful, such as science, history, and math, (And of course we’ve levelled the global playing field by making it necessary for everyone to learn English, which has the third-worst orthography among modern languages, after Japanese and Chinese.)

….

Whatever its causes, the handicap is well documented. It’s true that we Americans (along with the British, the Japanese, and the Chinese) have collectively managed to overcome the handicap of our crappy writing system; but this is not evidence that the handicap has paradoxically done us good.

You’ll want to read the whole thing, especially if you’re not that terrific a speller.

They really should have thought of this years ago. Oh, wait. They did:

In what many are hailing as a breakthrough solution to Greece’s crippling debt crisis, Greece today offered to repay loans from the European Union nations by giving them a gigantic horse.

Finance ministers from sixteen EU nations awoke in Brussels this morning to find that a huge wooden horse had been wheeled into the city center overnight.

The horse, measuring several stories in height, drew mixed responses from the finance ministers, many of whom said they would have preferred a cash repayment of the EU’s bailout.

But German Chancellor Andrea Merkel said she “welcomed the beautiful wooden horse,” adding, “What harm could it possibly do?”

(H/T: rogueclassicism)

Barry Strauss lists his top six.

Ronald Helfrich has written an intriguing essay comparing and contrasting Biblical Studies with Buffy Studies: “Note to Self, Religion Freaky”: When Buffy Met Biblical Studies.

I’ll admit I know very little about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I am quite familiar with the kinds of “crystal ball textualism” Helfrich describes. Unfortunately, I cannot agree with him that the field of Biblical Studies is as immune to this tendency and he seems to think.

This is a fascinating essay about hermeneutics, among other things. I commend it to you.

Rogueclassicism has suggested a few. Here are my favorites:

Jim Davila has the goods on a new book exploring angelic speculation and veneration in Roman religion:

NEW BOOK: Rangar Cline, Ancient Angels: Conceptualizing Angeloi in the Roman Empire (Brill, March 2011).

Although angels are typically associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Ancient Angels demonstrates that angels (angeloi) were also a prominent feature of non-Abrahamic religions in the Roman era. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the study uses literary, inscriptional, and archaeological evidence to examine Roman conceptions of angels, how residents of the empire venerated angels, and how Christian authorities responded to this potentially heterodox aspect of Roman religion. The book brings together the evidence for popular beliefs about angels in Roman religion, demonstrating the widespread nature of speculation about, and veneration of, angels in the Roman Empire

All those years of verb conjugations…et pour rien?

Sarkozy admits French language a hoax after Wikileaks exposé.

Zut alors!

(H/T: Language Log)

The Granny Woman trudges up the muddy road
that leads to the head of the holler
where her patient, impatient, awaits her ministration.

An anxious father greets her at the door.
She makes her way to the back room
where sisters and female cousins
are whispering courage to the woman
doubled over on the lumpy, white-metal bed.

She washes her hands in a basin
and opens up her bag,
rummaging for just the right instrument.
A knife slipped under the mattress
will draw away the pain,
the stabbing fiery declamation
that new life is on its way.
The sharpness of the blade
matches the sharpness of the labor—
and, God willing, intimidates it into silence.

Now the Granny Woman begins quietly
to sing,
to chant,
to cast her spell.

Who knows how long it will take?
It doesn’t matter:
Granny is here.
Granny is here.

She and everyone have entered the sacred moment.
They will stay there as long as it takes.

I missed this when it first came out in 2009. Anthropologists have constructed a “genetic” tree noting the developments and variations in the story of “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the varients shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.

He said: “Over time these folk tales have been subtly changed and have evolved just like an biological organism. Because many of them were not written down until much later, they have been misremembered or reinvented through hundreds of generations.

“By looking at how these folk tales have spread and changed it tells us something about human psychology and what sort of things we find memorable.

“The oldest tale we found was an Aesopic fable that dated from about the sixth century BC, so the last common ancestor of all these tales certainly predated this. We are looking at a very ancient tale that evolved over time.”