{"id":11172,"date":"2008-05-19T15:16:27","date_gmt":"2008-05-19T19:16:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/05\/19\/11172.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:39","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:39","slug":"book-report-towing-jehovah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/05\/19\/book-report-towing-jehovah\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Towing Jehovah"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger is not good at time management. Have I mentioned that before? Well, anyway, a couple of weeks ago, I was checking to see if my local public library had the new James Morrow book<\/a> yet, and they did, only somebody else got to it first, so I put my name on the list, and while I was thinking about James Morrow, I just thought I’d see whether Towing Jehovah was on the shelf. And it was, and I took it out and started rereading it, because I hadn’t read it in years, probably since shortly after it came out. I remember reading a review somewhere, and picking up Bible Stories for Adults<\/i>, which was wonderful, and then getting Towing Jehovah<\/i> after that, so it was probably 1996 or so, maybe 1997. Not later. I loved it at the time, but I didn’t purchase a copy, so I never went back to it.
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Ten years later it’s a trifle disappointing. One of the things that I liked the first time around, the way in which different people reacted differently to the Corpse based on different perceptions of the Universe, bugged me this time because none of the responses was very deep. Even the ones who had thought the most about the Divine had only surface reactions—entertaining ones, but not anything that lasted with me.
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Although something has been haunting me, and I’m afraid I returned the book so I can’t look up the exact quote, so I’ll have to paraphrase. Do y’all know the plot? At the opening of the book, angels have come to tell our main characters that the Divine Creator has died, and that we have to take care of the Corpse. When Our Hero is skeptical that the Divine has a corporeal body, the Angel quotes several passages from Scripture mentioning the Divine’s arm, fingers, eyes, face, buttocks, etc. Our Hero replies that surely those are metaphors. The Angel responds that everything is a metaphor.
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To me, that’s a startling sort of idea. The Big Idea of the book of course is that just as the mortals in the book have to find a way to deal with the rotting corpse of the Divine, so too do we in the real world have to find a way to deal with the rotting corpse of organized religion. Since of course YHB doesn't see organized religion as dead, there is only so far I can go on that voyage. This ancillary idea, however, that our metaphors have real existence, is somewhat scary. Are we metaphors for the Divine? Are you?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger puts off for James Morrow what he could have done last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18366,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11172\/revisions\/18366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}