Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

OK, here’s a brief rundown of what’s come before:

richardbarrett.blogspot.com continues to exist, alas unloved and unupdated as it is and will remain.

The Dell blog existed for a specific purpose; I still get the occasional e-mail and phone call, so it will stay up so that people have some kind of a road map of how somebody once managed to penetrate Dell’s corporate hierarchy, but I don’t plan on updating it regularly by any means, since I no longer spend any money with Dell at all.

The .Mac blog was fun, and everything that was posted there will stay posted there. Thing of it is, for much of what I was doing, iWeb is just plain unwieldy, and you just can’t do stuff with it that Blogger and WordPress can without a lot of extra work. Plus, text often winds up getting published as a graphic, so search engines won’t find things. There’s at least one posting from the .Mac blog where that’s a major problem (and it will probably find its way here in hopes that it solves that problem). I will probably still use it as a photo album–someday I’ll get the Oxford pictures up, I promise.

So, on the advice of a friend (hat tip to Anna Pougas on her patronal feast! Many years!), I’m giving WordPress a shot. I’m adding three words to the .Mac blog’s title so that I’ve got Latin, Greek, German AND Syriac all represented–why not, really? (And please don’t leave a bunch of comments explaining why not–it’s a lark. Deal with it.)

To explain:

Leitourgeia—Greek, noun, meaning “public work” (“work of the people” being another common understanding), as in “liturgy.”

kai—Greek, conjunction, meaning “and.”

Qurbana—Syriac, noun, meaning “offering” or “Eucharist.”

Contra—Latin, preposition, meaning “against,” as in Athanasius contra mundum, St. Athanasius of Alexandria having stood fast for the Orthodox Christian faith in the face of the Arian heresy.

den Zeitgeist—German, accusative singular, meaning “Spirit of the Age,” as in the chapter “Through Darkest Zeitgeistheim” in C. S. Lewis’ The Pilgrim’s Regress, where the protagonist John faces the most horrible monster Lewis has ever depicted, the Spirit of the Age.

Also, Lewis wrote an introduction for an English-language edition of St. Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.

So, we’ll try this for awhile, see what happens.