Yet there the nightingale filled all the desert with inviolable posts

There is a collection of sites in a Biblical Studies grouping known as Biblioblogs. Twitter feed @biblioblognews, duplicated (I think) at http://christianorigins.com/.

I tend to avoid sites that require a charitable donation to see the content. Generally I try to avoid ads for fat people or skinny people too. Sometimes this is impossible.

Biblical Studies as a discipline is hard to pinpoint so I should not complain of lack of focus or I will be tarred with my own brush. There is a wide variety on this invisible list of sites. Some are written by scholars or based on lectures by scholars, again a wide range from linguists to philosophers, seminarians to skeptics or both, theologians, pastors and determined students learning to unpack their determination. Some are from those who are, like me, neither scholar nor pastor. Some post often, some seldom. And the content varies: academic, personal, radical, liberal, conservative, serious, comical, even single-minded, possibly to the point of perseveration.

How many more adjectives can we put there? And dare I apply them to my own work? I get perseveration (even though my editor underlines it in red). It comes from certain forms of brain damage and must be met with love. While I know of it through catastrophe, I suspect it can also arise through great disappointment when growing out of a highly controlled childhood or other cruel trades.

In cyber regret a post was removed that began: Academia is a cruel trade. It means a life of loneliness in libraries, [or at the computer] mostly reading rubbish articles merely to make sure that you need not pay any attention to them.

April is the cruelest month. 

But it is August not April, so be of good cheer. After the heat of August, comes the harvest.

Eliot did not remove his Qohelet-like poem from his work:

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.

I am collecting posts for the Biblical Studies Carnival for this month, August 2015. Posts are not confined to this group called biblioblogs but I do troll through them (like a good troll, the kind that lives under bridges to eat passers by).

Let me know in a comment or on my twitter feed at drmacdonald if you have any posts from any blog you would like me to consider.

If you don't tell me about your favorite posts especially if I have to dig them out of the biblioblog list or my own lists then you've only yourself to blame that I missed them.

And tell me too if your favorites (for this August month) are not in that list. Who knows but that I might add your site to my lists. So don't worry about being in or out.

“What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

“I never know what you are thinking. Think.”