John Timpane

Have you studied classical languages? It takes some explaining if you haven’t. Greeks in antiquity themselves found Thucydides a hard read and Pindar often barely intelligible. One can more or less create a spoken language based on, say, Xenophon, but that won’t be sufficient for understanding Aeschylus’ lyrics only 50 years earlier. To ‘know’ Greek is to know a changing language and literature across a thousand years or more and spread across the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Asia. It’s not the same as learning a standard modern language unless, perhaps, you specify a circumscribed time and place, and the dialect in which it was spoken. And then there are disputable matters of idiom (the subject of philological scholarship) as well as meaning to contend with - even “just reading” a text requires that text to be accurately transmitted.

Lovers on Ferry, New York City, Photo by Don Donaghy, 1964

Christians should be the loudest voices advocating confronting climate change, not its biggest deniers. If we truly believe that God created all things, called it good, and called us to be stewards, then acknowledging and confronting climate change is the only faithful response.

Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928) was released in Paris, France, only 6 months after it was released in Denmark. This was due to the fact that the French Nationalists were offended because Dreyer was neither French nor Catholic. They were also upset by the rumour that an American Actress, Lillian Gish was cast as Joan in the movie. Under the orders of the Archbishop of Paris and government censors, Carl Theodor Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928), received numerous cuts & Dreyer had no control over it. The only negative of Dreyer's version was destroyed in a fire at the UFA Studios in Berlin. Dreyer then had to stitch together the movie using alternate and unused takes. Unfortunately, that cut too was destroyed in a fire at the French Studio where it was kept. Over the next 40 years a few different truncated versions of the movie surfaced much to Dreyer's dismay. In 1981, a miracle occurred. When a janitor at the Dikemark Hospital mental institution was cleaning out a store cupboard, he found three film canisters labelled 'The Passion of Joan of Arc'. These were sent to the Norwegian Film Institute, where they sat unopened for three years before finally being examined. Inside, they found Dreyer’s original 1928 cut, pre-government and religious censorship, fully intact. ("‘The Passion of Joan of Arc’: the silent masterpiece destroyed in a fire (twice)", Sam Kemp, Farout Magazine, 2023) P.S: On this day, 98 years ago, "The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1928) was released in Denmark.