• rhetoric of religion

One of those everyday events in the Bible Belt: a student comes in, happy at having just avoided a car accident, and says,"The Lord really saved me today!" I think to myself: "and if you'd been seriously injured or killed, what does that mean?" There must have been some point in the early modern period--perhaps it's later, a result of Pietism?--when Western Christians lost the classical and medieval notion of Fortuna as governing the affairs of men and states and replaced it with this notion of the Almighty as Yenta, ever meddling in our everyday lives. The notion is a subset of the larger theorhetorical problem of theodicy, but is worth exploring in its own terms. Anyone know? Uncle Mike?

• Jim Aune's blog
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