What do we eat with our cups of tea?

I’ve just finished reading Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, and loved it. BUT – at one point I think he’s mistaken about Australian English, which makes me wonder whether I can trust him on other matters.

To wit: “In Australia, people eat cookies, not biscuits”.

I eat biscuits. Always have. Definitely not cookies. But then I’m only second-generation Australian and I use lots of Scottish terms picked up from my mother: pants and vest rather than knickers/jocks and singlet; sweets rather then lollies; that sort of thing. So before metaphorically making nasty faces at Bryson I need to double-check with other Australians.
 
Do we eat biscuits or cookies?

Various matters of little interest to anyone but myself

It is the first of September. The first day of spring. Hooray! Even more importantly, the date means that I have been going to the gym three times a week for a whole month! And I’m weirdly enjoying it. Last Friday I dragged myself out of bed, moaning and groaning, and only went to the gym because I knew that if I skipped I wouldn’t be able to look an Internet friend from Sydney in the eye. (Which, given we’ve never met in the flesh, might not actually be that much of a problem.) And after all my moaning and groaning I actually felt energised and inspired as I headed home after my workout. Weird and bizarre! Exercise may be working for me.

Quote for the day

“In Victorian lifewriting, passionate references to hearts on fire and burning with love are a sure sign that a woman is about to discuss Jesus … People who thought of God as a friend easily linked friends to God … Loving the faraway friend echoed the human love of a Christ simultaneously distant in his divinity yet proximate in his humanity, and prayer thus became a medium of friendship as well as worship.”

Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 63-5.

I began by chuckling at the first sentence; by the end of the section I nervously began to suspect that I am in fact an out-of-time Victorian. Bother!

A quote for Alex

Reading God & Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now by John Dominic Crossan and I came across this description of an image of Jesus in Istanbul’s Church of St. Savior (now a museum):

As you pass from outer to inner narthex, the doorway is crowned with a magnificent mosaic of Christ Pantokrator … As in all such Eastern Icons, frescoes or mosaics of Christ, his right hand is raised in an authoritative teaching gesture, with his fingers separated into a twosome and a threesome to command Christian faith in the two natures of Christ and the three persons of the Trinity. As usual, he holds a book in his left hand. But he is not reading the book – it is not even open, but securely closed and tightly clasped.

Christ does not read the Bible, the New Testament or the Gospel. He is the norm of the Bible, the criterion of the New Testament, the incarnation of the Gospel. That is how we Christians decide between a violent and nonviolent God in the Bible, New Testament, or Gospel. The person, not the book, and the life, not the text, are decisive and constitutive for us.

Alex, I’m pretty sure I already know what your response to this will be …