If I could go back in time to the moment of my birth and crawl forward, pausing at every moment of unwarranted anger, any moment when I had hurt someone, intentionally or not, scrape those moments up like horse excrement and wash the pavement clean with torrents of baptismal water, that would be a most excellent way to spend another life.
Some time ago I saw New Testament for Spiritual Reading: The Gospel According to St. John Volume 2 by Josef Blank for $2 at...you guessed it, Half-Price Books.
I almost didn't pick it up since it was Volume 2, and there was no Volume 1 in sight. But then I thought, you know how these things go; you pass something up and then you never see it again...or you end up finding the other books in the series and wish you'd picked up that one. Besides what's two bucks these days? Not even a cup of coffee. So I bought it.
And then, as usual, the book sat on my shelf untouched for months.
But then I started reading Raymond E. Brown's The Death of the Messiah--a two volume, 1,600+ page tome--and decided that I need to read a lot more about religion in general and Christianity in specific...and The Gospels in specificer. So I think this is next.
But hey, what's the sense of starting with Volume 2? So I Googled. And found that Volume 1...and the afore- unsuspected Volume 3...was mostly unavailable...or kinda pricey. (This
was tempting...but (1) $60 ain't cheap and (2) I already had volume 2.
So what to do? The public library? Nope. The U of L library? Nope. Bellarmine? Nope.
😕
Ah. The Internet Archive?
Yes.
Volume 1: https://archive.org/details/newtestamentfors0007unse/mode/1up
Volume 3: https://archive.org/details/newtestamentfors0009unse_q8s0/mode/1up
Just one thing: while they had lots of other (maybe even all) of the books in the "new testament for spiritual reading" series, they DIDN'T have The Gospel According to John Volume 2.
🤔
No doubt the universe is evolving as it should.*
* Max Ehrmann ©1927...though I got it from Les Crane's "The Desiderata."
"...we are all on this ten-minute train ride between two infinities, from which either end no one can report...."
Kaveh Akbar
