To be honest, I'm not working on my essay intensely today, since I feel scatter-brained and like my concentration needs a rest. I have a bad conscience, but I want this to be a 'complete' essay and for that I want to keep researching different aspects and keeping a thoughtful pace until everything falls into place. Besides, I want to be accurate and not lie about anything except if all of my sources are at fault and so there's no way I could know that it's untruthful. Anyway, this should be a leisurely live-blog.
1:09 a.m. I'm foraying into general American religious life in the early 20th century and have discovered a census from 1951 which lists denominations, the numbers of their churches or synagogues or other houses of worship, and the numbers of their members. Now I'm looking up the churches which were listed on Wikipedia. I expect some invigorating sensationalist reading; some of the first words I read were "speaking in tongues." It is really fun to be reading about a subject for a long time and partly overcoming pretty dry texts, and then to start reading tidbits which are as stimulating and striking as anything fictitious.
1:36 a.m. "Eschatological." I've seen it before and have no idea what it means.
1:38 a.m. "The wicked will not suffer eternal torment in hell, but instead will be permanently destroyed." Merciful Heavens!
1:42 a.m. Note to self: must read New Testament to see if Jesus in fact cared what clothes people wore.
2:49 a.m. Washing of feet! (Not mine; it's a practice within the church I'm reading about.) The "anointing of oil" also reminds me of the anecdote, courtesy an old New York Review of Books article, about the ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft, a ceremony, and vegetable shortening. Or, indirectly, about the time my mother taught Sunday School and we made a tincture of hyssop steeped in alcohol. I was wondering why I couldn't remember the sermons in the church, and now I realize that it was because I wasn't always in the room then; I was in the basement with my age peers learning about the trinity or about Lazarus instead, in an ecumenical way since I'm baptized Catholic and the church was Protestant. (Obviously I'm in a reminiscent mood.)
3:38 a.m. Snake-handling.
4:16 a.m. Re. eschatology: oh.
5:09 a.m. I'm tired and will thus go to bed soon. (c:
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