This is likely to be the end of my New Year’s Resolution posts. There is still time left in the year. A little less than a week, to be precise. But with family coming and what not, I don’t see myself completing anything. Forty-four is not fifty-two, but it’s not a bad number for reading, when juggling reading with full time work that rarely ends at forty hours. I might even have made my goal if there hadn’t been a bad stretch when stress from work and life kept me from focusing.
But here we are…
When Jesus Became God is a narrative history, beginning roughly with the reign of Emperor Constantine and progressing through to the western Roman emperor, Theodosius, and that latter emperor’s active and not infrequently brutal support of what would now be considered doctrinally correct Christology within the Catholic church.
The first half or so of the book is a gripping historical roller coaster about the battle for the theological soul of the still new church. On one side (eventually labelled the ‘Pro-Nicenes’) were priests and bishops who advocated for what became the Trinitarian view of Christ’s nature. On the other side were the Arians, who saw Christ as the son of God, but also as markedly different from the Father. Not necessarily consubstantial. Some even considered Christ to have, in a sense, been adopted by God. Jesus was not of one being with the Father, but more human and a symbol of human perfectibility.
For myself, I had no idea how desperate the struggle between the two sides was nor how closely fought it was. Early on, the author has a great grasp of the historical figures and the historical milieu. Figures like Constantine and the sometimes bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, really ‘pop’ in the reading. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of other the figures of milieu in the latter half of the book, which feels rushed and far less character driven.
I suspect that Rubinstein really buried himself in the primary and secondary sources relating to those early days of the struggle and felt a stronger connection than he did with the last half of the story, which is fine, but the reader suffers a bit for it. Honestly, the book is barely over two hundred pages and I don’t think it’s asking too much of a writer not to flag quite so much in the writing of it.
There’s no point to this post. It’s just a simple bit of remembrance of something stupid.
For a time in the mid-2000s, I lived in an apartment on the beach and spent a significant portion of my time at a bar that was technically called Yabba Dew’s Beach Bar. An insanely stupid name, I agree. Really stupid. Can’t wipe its own arse stupid. But it was the bar closest by and whenever my roommate and I would go to the ones a little further down (I think their names were Paddy’s and On the Rocks), we were always disappointed in the number of irritating kids from nearby Stetson University. We wanted to drink around grown ups. We might have stayed if every Stetson girl we met were not supremely annoying. I mean, when you’re single and live within staggering distance of a bar that serves significant quantities of co-eds, you first thought is, “jackpot!” But oh my god, it was not possible to talk to them. We were in our late twenties (and I might have turned thirty during that time of my life, but I would have denied it), which probably part of the problem in trying to talk to 21-24 year olds (assuming none of them were using a fake ID which, let’s be honest, we shouldn’t assume). Long story short, there are better ways of getting laid.
So. Yabba Dews.
We drank Michelob Ultra because draft beer in Florida sucks. No craft beer in walking distance of the apartment. Mich Ultra wasn’t so bad and it’s a union beer (never drink Coors). I regularly ate salads there and french fries slathered with tabasco sauce (I have mixed feelings about ketchup).
At this time in American history, we had collectively decided that watching people play poker on television was something we wanted.
ESPN and ESPN2 showed nothing but poker tournaments all day and all night, so you sit there at the bar, numbly drinking your watered down piss until something like a buzz comes on and watching people play cards. I credit Obama for the end of non-stop poker on television.
There was a crazy sculpture named Fishbone who claimed he designed and made the metal logos for the Bonefish Grill chain. He looked sort of like an oversized hobbit. A server who had crush of me and was quite upfront with her willingness to sleep with me, but she was nineteen and had some terrible stories about bad family life at home and it just seemed wrong, except when I was drunk enough and fortunately, I was never quite agile enough to call the phone number she had given me.
I went to the library almost every day and browsed through a magazine or two or read the paper. Cool Beanz had mediocre coffee, but a nice patio. These were my alternatives to poker, but the dark draw of the bar was impossible to resist for a full twenty-four hours, so inevitably, there I was, a glass of almost totally transparent beer and plate of fries and a bottle of hot sauce.
the coffee philosopher 