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Sicut alicubi dixit medicus bonus Habibus Magnus: Confiteor. [As the good doctor Habib the Great has put it elsewhere: “I Confess”] [Hey, it’s not my fault Habib chose to quote the Catholic Mass in Latin.] You know, Habib le toubib, I’ve been expecting a question like this for maybe a month or two. Since I […]

Let me preface this by saying that I am a cinematic dunce. At least, when I was a kid, Bill Collins was still presenting pre-1950 Hollywood films every Saturday night on Australian television. That was the 80s, of course. I think I got a lot more depth in my cinematic education then than the young […]

I got a fifth of the way through the Temple on holiday (his complete works), before deciding that I needed to go back and get a listing of what the good stuff was. A couple of the short poems I read were good. Not transcendentally good, but good enough that I looked forward to finding […]

The cumulative effect of the following: Patriarchy, and its concern to control fertility and access to fertile women as tribal commodities. The concern of archaic Judaism to associate fertility with religious identity (circumcision). The dismissal of bodily desire as more base than spiritual pursuits, to be regulated (already present in both Judaism and several strands […]

Cyril of Alexandria. Patriarch of Alexandria. Doctor of the Church. Founder of Mariology, and formulator of the concept of the Mother of God. Establisher of Miaphysitism, the distinct belief of the Oriental Orthodox Church; yet his formulation was also foundational to the Chalcedonian Christianity of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church. Even if you don’t […]

Yeah, when I was an undergrad, someone did a conceptual art thingy, involving nailing books into the lawn. And students had the kind of anguish that McKayla Kennedy spoke of in her Pinterest answer. And rescued the books; I got a Ulysses out of it. The books were going to be pulped by the publishers […]