Oxford University Press's Blog, page 259

Finding meaning in poetry

The Oxford Dictionary defines poetry as a piece of writing expressing feelings and ideas that are given intensity by particular attention to diction. Poetry at its core is a uniquely personal form of expression. To honor National Poetry Month, we’re sharing what poetry means to the writers of the Pavilion Poetry Series, including a sample from Nuar Alsadir’s new collection Fourth Person Singular. Maybe it will inspire to explore what poetry means to you.

Jodie Hollander, poet of the collection My Dark Horses — a body of work that celebrates the separateness and connectedness of human experience in relationships, and our capacity to harm and love.

“For me, a good poem possesses two essential qualities: musicality and an expression of emotion. Not only is musicality vital in distinguishing poetry from prose, but the tempo, meter, and flow of a musical poem creates a strong sense of enjoyment for the reader. The expression of feelings is the second vital part of a good poem. Whether the emotion is readily on the surface, or buried deeper in the work, good poetry grapples with some expression of feeling. Through both music and emotion, poetry has the capacity to reach people deeply and tap into the essence of our humanity.”

Hollander, originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was raised in a family of classical musicians. She studied poetry in England, and her poems have appeared in journals such as The Poetry Review, PN Review, and The New Criterion, among many others.

Alice Miller, poet of the collection Nowhere Nearer — poems that look at how we forge our worlds from the stories of the dead, the illusion of progress, and “the futures we never let happen.”

“I grew up an atheist and I’ve never managed to believe in gods. For me poetry is the closest we ever come to challenging death. Poems create a hypothetical space, a counterfactual space, where impossible pasts, presents, and futures can coexist inside a kind of music.”

Miller is a Berlin-based New Zealand poet, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her work has appeared in Boston Review, Oxford Poetry, Poetry London, The Rialto, and The American Scholar. Nowhere Nearer is her second collection.

Image credit: Business paper coffee by ThoughtCatalog. CC0 via Pixabay.

Ruby Robinson, poet of the collection Every Little Sound — a celebration of the separateness and connectedness of human experience in relationships, and our capacity to harm and love.

“Sometimes, I like to think of poetry as a kind of resonance; things and beings chiming with one another, creating a special sense of meaning, or enactment, or vibrancy. It could be a child describing a forest, or the anecdote shared between two people on a bus, a serendipitous moment, a feeling of intuition or a coincidence. It could be song lyrics, nursery rhyme, bird song, a heartfelt rant. The beauty of poetry is its limitless potential to spark connections and new understanding without the reductive laws of other forms of language; in a poem, anything can happen.”

Robinson was born in Manchester, England. She studied English literature at the University of East Anglia and is a graduate of the Sheffield Hallam University Writing MA. This is her debut poetry collection.

An excerpt from Fourth Person Singular by Nuar Alsadir  

Sketch 27

A man entered the subway car at Borough Hall,

was about to sit, but just as his knees began to bend

the train jerked into motion. He stood up, as though

regaining composure after a brief humiliation,

as though it were somehow shameful to be subject

to gravity’s impersonal force, caught

in its grips, an object controlled by physics.

Alsadir is a poet, writer, and psychoanalyst. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Grand Street, the Kenyon Review, and Poetry Review, among others. Her latest collection Fourth Person Singular was shortlisted for the 2017 The National Book Critics Circle in Poetry.

Featured image credit: Book by marcopiffero. CC0 via Pixabay .

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How well do you know Adam Smith? [quiz]

This April, the OUP Philosophy team honors Adam Smith (1723-1790) as their Philosopher of the Month. Smith was an eminent Scottish moral philosopher and the founder of modern economics, best- known for his book, The Wealth of Nations (1776) which was highly influential in the development of Western capitalism as well as the other superior philosophical work, The Theory of Moral Sentiment.

You may have read his work, but how much do you really know about Adam Smith? Test your knowledge with our quiz below.

Quiz image: Adam Smith, The Muir portrait. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Featured image: Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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How will population ageing affect future end of life care?

Increasing population ageing means that deaths worldwide are expected to rise by 13 million to 70 million per year in the next 15 years. As a result, there is an urgent need to plan ahead to ensure we meet the growing end of life care needs of our population in the future.

Understanding where people die, and how this could change in the future, is vital to ensuring that health services are equipped to support people’s needs and preferences at the end of life. As researchers at the Cicely Saunders Institute, King’s College London, we investigated trends in place of death in England and Wales, and found that deaths occurring in care homes could more than double in the next 25 years if recent trends continue.

Using official records on over five and a half million deaths, as well as population forecasts, we estimated the number of people who will die in a range of different settings in years to come. The intention behind this study is that it will help to guide future planning of health and social care. From 2004 to 2014, the proportion of deaths occurring in care homes increased from 17% to 21%, with numbers rising from 85,000 to 106,000 per year. If this trend continues, the number of people dying in care homes will double to over 220,000 per year by 2040, and care homes will overtake hospitals as the most common place to die. Home deaths are also projected to increase over this period to over 216,000 deaths a year. Together, this means that deaths in the community are expected to account for over two-thirds of all deaths by 2040.

We also know that, increasingly, people are living and dying with multiple illnesses and frailty, which adds complexity to their care needs. The rising number of people with complex illness in the community is a challenge for end of life care. A recent study has shown that palliative care needs are expected to increase by 42% by the year 2040. We need greater integration of specialist palliative care into primary care services, as well as more training in palliative care for general health professionals, to ensure that those with palliative care needs can access services they require.

The projected rise of deaths in care homes and in peoples’ own homes is striking. We must ask care home and community services whether they are equipped to both support such an increase in demand and provide high quality end of life care. How can we provide the workforce needed to care for this growing patient group? To enable people to die in their preferred place in future, we need to ensure adequate bed capacity, resources, and training of staff in palliative and end of life care in all care homes in the country. These projections warn of the urgent need to invest more in care homes and community health services. Without this investment, people are likely to seek help from hospitals, which puts pressure on an already strained system and is not where most people would prefer to be at the end of their lives.

Image credit: “National Care Home Open Day” by CQC Press Office. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

The time has come to test new approaches to care in order to ensure that we address this growing need of our population in the years to come. There are promising examples of innovations in care to increase the reach of palliative care services in community settings, for example project ECHO, which facilitates knowledge-sharing between specialist palliative care services, such as hospices, and general health care professionals such as those in care homes. In an era of increasing need alongside constrained health and social care budgets, developing and testing innovative ways to provide high quality care with minimal resources is imperative.

In the words of Cicely Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement, “how people die remains in the memory of those who live on.”The inevitable population changes described here will affect all of us, directly or indirectly, in the years to come. It is time for us as a society to have an open discussion about how we want health services to be delivered to people towards the end of life. Crucially, we need better evidence on how we can best support a growing number of older people as they reach the end of their lives.

Featured image credit: Image 12419. CC0 via pxhere .

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Global Health Days – immunity and community

24 April marks the start of World Immunization Week – an annual campaign first launched in 2012. The week is one of 8 WHO international public health events, which include those targeting major infectious diseases – World AIDS day, World Tuberculosis (TB) day, World Malaria day, and World Hepatitis Day. These infections share a few features with each other which mean they all will continue to be global health threats for some time to come – this includes in particular the need for new or better vaccines. Where are we with vaccines for these very challenging diseases and indeed why are they so challenging?

AIDS is caused by HIV, a retroviral infection which crossed in to humans from chimpanzees in the last century and has spread to pandemic proportions. In humans, HIV targets the immune system ultimately leading to its collapse and the development of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). HIV has evolved complex strategies for long term infection and as a result is very hard to eliminate, either through immune responses or through drugs. The most modern drug treatments can lead to very effective suppression of the virus and thus protect the immune system. This approach – which requires the use of drug combinations – has saved countless lives and is the mainstay of therapy. Such drugs can also be used (along with other methods) to protect people against infection if they are at risk – so called Pre-exposure prophylaxis or PrEP. This situation is a remarkable turnaround from 30 years ago, when World AIDS day was launched. Things have not improved in this way in some of the other infections mentioned – drugs which were widely used to treat malaria and TB 3 decades ago are now plagued by widespread resistance in the micro-organisms.

However, effective as they are, HIV drugs cannot lead to a cure, as there is a long-term “reservoir” of virus in the body which is not eliminated by such an approach. Of the many millions infected, only one individual (the “Berlin patient”) has been cured of HIV – this was following complex medical therapy including a bone marrow transplant. There have been some individuals who have come close and there are a rare, but well recognised subset of “elite controllers” who show almost no signs of ongoing infection, largely as a result of very powerful immune responses. All these observations have spurred the field on to try and develop new cure strategies to eliminate the reservoir and allow people to stop taking antiviral therapy in the long term. Such approaches are still very much at the experimental stage and typically target the HIV reservoir using a combination of methods to reactivate the virus in the reservoir and then kill those cells through enhanced immune responses – potentially using novel “therapeutic” vaccines.

This situation contrasts markedly with that in hepatitis C – this is recognised with other hepatitis viruses affecting 500 million people globally on World Hepatitis Day in July each year. Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) causes, like HIV, long term infection, with potentially the development of liver failure and liver cancer. HCV was only discovered as an infectious agent in 1989 and like HIV is hard to eliminate as it has evolved an array of techniques to evade the host’s immune system. However, unlike HIV, it does not set up a “latent” or hidden reservoir. This means that antiviral drug treatments taken for a few weeks can lead to long-term cure. In the last 5 years, several such treatments (again drugs taken in combination) have been developed and are now available for  different HCV strains. There are still many issues to solve, particularly identifying those at risk, and paying for the high costs of such treatments – but this three-decade arc, from discovery to effective cures has shown what can be done with concerted international effort.

 World Immunization Week and the other internationally recognised public health days serve to remind of the everyday crises we face as a global population.

The issue of vaccine development unites HIV, HCV, TB, and malaria. Vaccination for a range of infections has saved countless lives globally and provides one of the key global health tools at our disposal. Although a vaccine exists for TB in the form of BCG, this is only really effective in infants and around 1 in 3 of the world’s population is infected. Malarial vaccines have been developed and approved but the long-term efficacy of these is still not proven. Even for hepatitis C, where the new drugs have transformed the outlook for patients, an effective vaccine would still have a major impact in interrupting spread and preventing new infections. One vaccine trial for HIV has shown marginal efficacy, while others, which looked impressive in pre-clinical trials, have been shown to be ineffective in the real-world setting.

The reason we lack a good vaccine for these infections is in some ways specific to each but there is an underlying commonality, which is that microbes have had a head start for thousands of years. Co-evolution between viruses or bacteria and their hosts have selected out micro-organisms which can exploit weaknesses in the immune system. One common trick, which is used by HIV, HCV, and malaria, is to keep modifying its shape, such that new immune responses must continuously chase a moving target. Generating a protective vaccine in each case will mean targeting the immune response to regions of the microbe which cannot be so readily mutated. These approaches are quite painstaking and the development (including the field testing) of new vaccines for these infections will be slow – but it is still an important task and even if the risk of failure for any one approach is still high, the gain for all of us is potentially huge.

World Immunization Week and the other internationally recognised public health days serve to remind of the everyday crises we face as a global population. They also serve to remind us that we need to fight these as a global population – the microbes themselves do not recognise international barriers. The stigma attached to many of these infections even today is also a problem which needs to be addressed – effective education, understanding, and acceptance of the issues surrounding the spread and prevention of such infections is the first step in controlling them. The development of new vaccines for all these major infections (and many others) is a priority which needs sustained public investment – but the human immune system can only do so much. It needs everybody’s commitment and, ultimately, everybody’s support.

Featured image credit: doctors office by annekarakash. Public domain via Pixabay .

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World Intellectual Property Day quiz

Every year on 26 April, the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) celebrates World Intellectual Property Day to promote discussion of the role of intellectual property in encouraging creativity and innovation. As demonstrated by French shoemaker Christian Louboutin’s recent appeal to the European Court of Justice to determine the validity of the trademark protecting the famous red sole, intellectual property law is as relevant as ever. Do you know your rights as a creator? How is technology challenging traditional conceptions of intellectual property? Put your skills to the test with our intellectual property law quiz!

 

Featured image credit: Lightbulb by Mikael Kristenson. Public domanin via Unsplash.

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The road to safe drugs

Healthcare is expensive, and not just in high income countries. Those who are suffering or struck by illness in resource limited countries are often unable to afford services that can provide them the care they need. Inequitable access to health services continues to be among the greatest public health challenges of our time.

Since becoming the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Geberyasus has made universal healthcare a corner stone of his agenda. The idea is that all people, regardless of who they are, where they live, or what they earn, deserve access to healthcare. The idea is both noble and timely. However, implicit in the goal of universal health care is not just access to a healthcare center and a provider, but access to medicines that are of the desired quality. This assumption, that medicines provided to the sick will be effective and not cause harm, is unfortunately not true in large parts of the world.

In Pakistan, where I grew up, poor quality medicines given at a public hospital in Lahore led to over 200 deaths in 2011. In Nigeria in 2007, 84 babies died when a teething syrup was contaminated. Panama was hit hard in 2006 by a Chinese manufactured cough syrup which had an anti-freeze as a poor-quality substitute for glycerine.

Recent reports suggest that at least 10% of all global drug supplies fail to meet the basic quality and efficacy standards. Reports about individual life-saving drugs in several countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America show that as much as 50% or more of the said drugs may be fake, substandard, or counterfeit. Estimating the exact impact of the global burden of poor quality drugs is hard because those who are most affected often suffer from a variety of ailments, and unlikely to report deterioration of their condition because of culture, distance from a healthcare facility, lack of funds, poor awareness, or low interest by the government in listening to them.

The problem transcends both time and space. It is by no means a 21st century problem. From the description of counterfeiters in Homer’s texts, to the merchants of fake quinine bark to cure Malaria in Europe to the sulfonamide disaster in the 1930s in the US, the problem has continued to impact unsuspecting customers for centuries. The roots of drug regulation, in an effort to safeguard public health, also go back millennia from Homer’s recommendations for controlling quality, to the formation of Hisba offices in Muslim Arabia, to the modern pharmacopeias. The problem of quality no longer affects those who live in the poorest parts of the world, as complicated supply chains connecting multiple countries and increasing internet commerce has made communities across the world vulnerable.

Colours health medicine by freestocks.org. Public domain via Pexels.

The problem has political dimensions and real commercial consequences. There is ongoing debate on what really is a poor-quality drug. The battle about patents, generics, and quality has played out at the highest levels with countries, institutions, and industries blaming each other. Ironically, with the sense of blame there is also a strong sense of self-pity. Large pharmaceutical companies, that guarantee quality, feel that they are being painted unfairly and their efforts for R&D are being undermined by disregard for patents. Generic firms, backed by governments in India, China, and Brazil feel that there is a systematic effort to keep good drugs from the most vulnerable in their countries. Consumers in low income countries often feel that they  are either being victimized by policies hatched by high-income nations, or by systematic corruption of their own regulators.

Tied to the issue of blame is the presence of real gaps that make the problem difficult to track and impossible to address. Technological solutions are either too expensive or too limited in their scope for broad implementation. The incentives to create better technologies are lacking due to limited funding and low priority among governments and funding agencies. Justice systems, not only in low income countries but also in the US and Europe, find that their hands are tied by existing laws against procuring and selling poor quality medicines. The courts are, at best, able to impose weak penalties for the crime. Finally, citizens, from medical professionals to pharmacists, students to innovators, are woefully unaware of the problem of substandard drugs, and their efforts are uncoordinated and often unhelpful.

Despite the growing challenge, there is room for optimism. This optimism comes from recent (albeit only a few) efforts by institutions like USAID and US Pharmacopeia to put the problem on the global map through advocacy, funding for technological development, and regulatory system improvements in low income countries. Public health professionals and scholars who study the problem also point to other industries, such as the aviation industry, where there is no tolerance, at any level, for poor quality products. China, increasingly concerned about its global image, is also cracking down on those within its borders who produce or supply poor quality raw materials or finished products. The FDA in the US has increased its partnership with Indian counterparts to elevate the level of drug manufacturing in India.

Yet, there is a lot more to be done – from citizen engagement to redefining the legal framework, from student awareness to incentivizing innovators. Failure on any level would make the goal of providing universal quality care to all citizens just an elusive dream.

Featured image credit: Apothecary by Stevepb. Public domain via Pixabay .

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Who sang it best?: a Chicago mixtape

Chicago is arguably one of the most famous Broadway musicals of the 20th century, if not the most famous. Based off Maurine Dallas Watkins’ satiric 1926 play, it has spawned a Tony Award-winning revival and Academy Award-winning movie version. Songs like “All That Jazz” and “Cell Block Tango” have become household tunes and were recorded as singles by jazz and pop singers alike.

So many versions of the same song can lead to contention: was Chita Rivera’s original “All That Jazz” the most varied interpretation, or does one prefer the breathiness of Renée Zellweger’s raw (if underdeveloped) take on it? How “jazzy” should the song be? (It is a show tune, after all).

We’ve curated a selection of some of the best songs from the Chicago soundtrack, including recordings from various stage productions of the musical as well as the 2002 film version. Indulge in some nostalgia for a classic Bob Fosse musical, and decide for yourself who sang “Razzle Dazzle” the best.

Featured image credit: “Chicago” by Kevin Dooley. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Etymology gleanings for April 2018

Part 1: A Turning Point in the History of Spelling Reform?

On 30 May 2018 the long-awaited International Spelling Congress will have its first online meeting. “The Congress is intended to produce a consensus on an acceptable alternative to our current unpredictable spelling system. The goal is an alternative which maximizes improved access to literacy but at the same time avoids unnecessary change.

The Congress will be open to all English speakers who favour/favor or are benevolently neutral towards English spelling reform. It will be conducted largely by way of webinar, although there will be one, or possibly two, physical meetings. The first session on 30 May 2018 will comprise talks on spelling and spelling reform, plus an open session, which will discuss among other matters guidance to the authors of alternative schemes. After the first session, the guidance will be finalised/ finalized and an Expert Commission appointed. Authors will then submit their schemes and the Commission will produce a short list. Following a reconvened session, participants will vote on a final choice. The scheme chosen will then be promoted to run alongside current spelling in the hope that it will eventually gain general acceptance in the English Speaking World and become the new norm. The Congress is being organised/ organized by the English Spelling Society with the encouragement and assistance of the American Literacy Council.

He is trying to master English spelling. We are so sorry. Image credit: “Homework Boy Child Student Learning Book Kid” by paperelements. CC0 via Pixabay.

Such is the official notice. Spellers and misspellers of the world unite! I would like to add a few April Theses to that notice. They reflect my thoughts on the matter. 1. We need a reform that will gain acceptance even in those quarters in which it has few or no supporters. To achieve this goal, it should be persuasive and “user-friendly.” Even the most conservative people will probably not mind seeing skathe for scathe (sc– seems to be unnecessary everywhere), but will fight the invasive surgery of the hav, giv type for have and give. 2. Quite possibly, the abolition of the most useless double letters in Romance words like commune (especially if we remind people that Italian does without them) and Germanic words like till (conjunction) will also meet with minimal resistance. Indeed, isn’t committee a bit too long? 3. Ideally, we may live without the letter q. Quotas will lose none of their value if they happen to be known as kwotas. The same can be said about the letter x and of y in words like stymie. To be sure, names are untouchable, at least for the time being; Xerxes will probably have to remain Xerxes. 4. The rules of current American spelling (honor, organize, etc.) should be looked into without nationalistic prejudice. After all, they have existed for a long time, and the earth still goes round the sun. 5. I believe that the reform should pass through several stages: one step after another. 6. The Congress will be a success if it does not degenerate into multiple theoretical discussions (that is, a market brawl), though at least two talks—one on the objections to the Reform and the other on the success of such a reform elsewhere—might be useful. 7. The fewer generalities, the better. Perhaps the best thing will be to submit the most urgent list of words to be reformed right away. 8. Our success hinges on the support of influential politicians, famous contributors to opinion columns, and top people in education. We need the public on our side. I see the greatest danger in speaking to one another and inside fighting. 9. Beware of the radicals in our midst who will want all or none. Note the statement above on avoiding unnecessary change.  10. Don’t hope for producing an ideal version of English spelling. It probably does not exist, and English is not Finnish.

In April 1917, Lenin wrote a series of instructions to his party about the strategy for seizing power. The document is known as April Theses. April theses never fail. Image credit: The April Theses by Vladimir Lenin, courtesy of Goodreads.
Part 2: Separate words
Liver and kidneys.

For liver see some interesting comments after the recent post titled: “Are you of my kidney?” It is true that ner(e), the Middle English word for “kidney,” looks like Latin rēn, read from right to left. But how could they be related, especially because ner is rather far removed from the reconstructed protoform?  Likewise, the connection between Greek phrēn “brain” and Latin rēn, however curious, can be made out only if we get rid of the initial two consonants. If someone can show us the way for performing this deed, I’ll be the first to rejoice.  I have been informed by a reader that the Hebrew Bible mentions kidneys 31 times; once the word means “wheat.” The English translations are inconsistent. My conclusion: it is always better to read everything in the original.

Gums and brain.

I won’t dare discuss the Baltic forms, but perhaps the following side remarks won’t strike our correspondent as quite irrelevant.  The Slavic form for “brain” is mozg’’. Its distant origin is not entirely clear, but the widely divergent senses of the sound complex mozg, recorded in dialects, are curious. The word can mean “the rim of the wheel,” “wedge used for joining two objects,” “kernel,” and even “blood.” Mozg is obviously related to Engl. marrow, and marrow is the substance contained in bones, “brain of the bone,” as it were. The association with bones resulted in the rise of the sense “wedge” and the names of other hard objects. Now, gums are connected with teeth, and teeth are also hard. Engl. gum used to mean “(mouth) cavity,” so that its present-day meaning is late. By contrast, German Zahnfleisch “tooth meat” is quite transparent. Russian desna “gum” (stress on the second syllable) may be related to dent-. “Brain” ~ “marrow”—“bone”—“hard thing”—“tooth”—“gum”….  So the words for “brain” and “gum” may perhaps be sometimes connected in people’s linguistic intuition.

The word article

The word surfaced in English in the thirteenth century and meant “point of contract, item.” It reached English from Latin via Old French. From ‘”item” the development went to “moment,” “piece of business, and “commodity.” The grammatical sense of article goes back to Greek árthron “joint.” The verb articulate used to mean “utter with distinctness.” This meaning is easily recognized in the adjective articulate.

The name Doane

The question concerned the spelling Doane, which is a well-known variant of Donne. This variant and a few others (Doune, among them) may owe their existence to the capricious spelling of early Modern English scribes. I could not find any details, but for centuries it was fashionable to “beatify” names by adding extra letters and making them look less “trivial”: hence Wilde, Wyld, Smyth, Smythe, and the like.

The most famous of all Donnes. Image credit: John Donne, late 17th century copy of a 1616 work by Isaac Oliver. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Maze and amaze

See the post for November 6, 2013. I received a most interesting letter from a correspondent in Somerset, UK. There is no point retelling it, but do look up Glastonbury Tor and Golowan Festival!

Street in Gothic and elsewhere

The mysterious Gothic word plapjo “street,” occurring once in the text of the Bible, certainly looks like Greek plateîa. Therefore, several attempts exist to explain it as a garbled form of the Greek noun or a scribal error. Perhaps plapjo indeed goes back to plateîa. The main question is why Wulfila avoided gatwo, which he used in another place for “street.” I would like to repeat that before towns acquired their modern appearance, people did not need a word for “street,” and when the concept developed, all kinds of metaphors could be used. The Russian for “street” goes back to the idea of some sort of receptacle, possibly a narrow tube (ulitsa “street” ~ uley “beehive”; stress on the first syllable in both).

A classic plapjo? Image credit: “People Talking People Standing Communication Talk”by zstupar. CC0 via Pixabay.

Engl. street is derived from Latin strata “straight.” The root of Greek stratós “army” emerges recognizable from such English words as strategy and stratagem. Engl. stratum is also related (cf. stratify). The ancient root must have meant “to lay out, spread, extend.” Engl. strew and straw are akin to stratum. The relationship between straight and strategy is not quite direct: one word is a borrowing, through oral communication, from Latin, while the other came centuries later from Greek books.

In connection with gatwo, I mentioned Engl. gate (two senses) and gait, and even Engl. gaiter. Gaiter came to English from French and turned up in texts only in the eighteenth century. The origin of the French word is almost impenetrable. In 15th-century French, it had the form guestre.

I live in a state in which this year winter lingered much too long. But in April I have received, in addition to questions and inquiries, unusually many words of encouragement, which warmed the cockles of my heart. Thank you!

Featured image: An amazing place with an unforgettable maze. Featured image credit: Glastonbury Tor from north east showing terraces by Rodw. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. 

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Animal of the Month: ten facts about penguins

Penguins are some of the most varied and remarkable creatures on the planet. With 17 extant species’ inhabiting the earth, this bird family contain a vast range of sizes, habitats, skills, and behaviours. This April, to honour our animal of the month, we celebrate 10 amazing facts about the penguin.

1. All creatures great and small

Image credit: Emperor Penguins by Christopher Michel. CC0 via Flickr.

The largest of all the penguin species’ is the Emperor Penguin, standing at around 48 inches tall and weighing up to 45kg. The Emperor and King Penguins form the only members of the “Great Penguins”, or Aptenodytes—derived from the ancient Greek meaning “wingless diver”.

The smallest penguin is the Little Blue Penguin, sometimes known as the “Fairy Penguin”. This species reaches heights of around 13 inches, and weighs on average just 1.5kg.

Image credit: Fairy Penguin by RBerteig. CC0 via Flickr.

2. Baptism of ice

The Emperor Penguin is also the only species to breed during the coldest months of the Antarctic tundra. Coupling Emperor Penguins lay just one egg each year, and while the females hunt for food in the icy seas, the males remain to incubate their future chicks through temperatures reaching −40 °C, the coldest breeding temperatures for any bird on the planet.

3. North and south

 

Image credit: Sunbathing Humboldt Penguins by Bernard Spragg. Public domain via Flickr.

Penguins are renowned for their habitats in the frozen Antarctic ice, but many species’ venture far north of these frosty climes.

The Galapagos Penguin is the most northerly dwelling of all penguins. This well insulated creature has colonies on the islands all along the Ecuadorian coast, and has even been spotted venturing north of the equator.

4. Need for speed

Image credit: Diving Penguin by Alasdair. CC0 via Flickr.

All penguins are adapted to have exceptionally streamlined bodies, allowing them to hunt proficiently and escape predators while diving through the waves. As a result, penguins can reach incredible speeds while swimming. The fastest species is the Gentoo Penguin, which has been recorded reaching up to 22 miles per hour.

However, the penguin is even faster through the air. Although they are flightless, many members of the bird family use a technique called ‘porpoising’—using their momentum to propel themselves above the surface and increase their speed, either to avoid predators, catch fish, or just for the thrill of the jump.

5. Deep dive

Penguins can also dive into incredibly deep waters to catch their prey. The Emperor Penguin is the deepest recorded diver of the penguin family, reaching average depths of 100 to 200 metres. However, they can go much deeper, with the deepest recorded dive at an astonishing 565 metres.

6. Camouflage 

Image credit: IMG_6565 by senngokujidai4434. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

Penguins wear black and white for good reason. Their distinctive, monochrome wardrobe allows them to remain safe from predators and catch prey. From above, predatory birds like eagles and great skuas cannot easily identify their black bodies in the water; from below, their catch have difficulty detecting their white bellies against the sunlit surface.

7. Walking with dinosaurs

Penguins are nothing new. Several fossilised ancestors have been identified over the years, the oldest of which is around 60 million years old. A recent study on a 57 million year old fossil suggested that this penguin ancestor would have been 5 foot, 7 inches tall.

Scientists estimate that ancient penguins diverged from their closest avian relatives and became flightless around 66 million years ago, just after the mass extinction which wiped out almost all life on earth. This means that modern day penguins are descended from a creature which shared the earth with the dinosaurs.

8. View from space 

Though many species’ of penguin are now threatened or endangered by human activity, in 2017 researchers spotted a “super-colony” of Adélie Penguins from space.

Scientists attempting to track the population of this species first noticed the colony in images taken from orbit, showing vast areas of the Antarctic Danger Islands covered by guano—or penguin excrement. Estimates suggest the colony contains around 1.5 million Adélie Penguins.

9. Keeping mum

Image credit: Penguin parents by Christopher Michel. CC0 via Flickr.

Because all penguins raise their young in large, communal crèches, these birds have become adept at “kin recognition”. Researchers of the Snares Crested Penguin, African Penguin, and Fiordland Crested Penguin have noticed the remarkable ability of both parents and chicks to easily identify their kin even amongst vast groups.

Amongst Emperor Penguins, in which a couple’s sole chick is frequently lost to the freezing Antarctic temperatures, females have been known to “adopt”—or otherwise “chick-nap”—another couple’s hatchling.

10. Feathery friends 

Image credit: Moulting King Penguin by Brian Gratwicke. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

In order to cope amidst freezing temperatures, penguin feathers are adapted to maintain insulation. Over their warm, blubbery skin, penguins are covered by downy feathers, which trap a layer of insulating air around their body. These downy feathers turn into stiff, interlocked ends, which protect against the wind and other elements.

Unlike most birds, which shed feathers throughout the year, penguins undergo an annual “catastrophic moult”, in which they shed and regrow their plumage at once. A recent study on King Penguins found that this process takes on average 32 days.

Featured image: “Happy World Penguin Day!” by Christopher Michel. CC via Flickr.

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The New Testament: Jewish or Gentile?

A recent phenomenon in New Testament research is the involvement of Jewish scholars. They perform the vital task of correcting Christian misunderstandings, distortions, stereotypes, and calumnies, with the aim of recovering the various Jewish contexts of Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement. This is a welcome development in the painful history of Jewish-Christian relations.

There is a danger, however, among Christians, of a kind of nostalgia for “Jewish roots”—an expectation that by closely examining Jesus’s original message, and “authentic” Jewish form of Christianity, one can bypass centuries of mistrust and worse. Matters are not that simple. Christianity grew out of a complex dual heritage: the Christian message quickly spread into the Greek-speaking world, and its adherents were soon majority Gentile. The implications of this are profound and already reflected in the New Testament.

The New Testament books were written before any “parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity. In the first century, it was impossible to distinguish between what was “Jewish” and what was “Christian.” “Messiah” started as a Jewish concept, and the followers of Jesus interpreted his life, death, and resurrection within the framework provided by the Jewish scriptures. There was, however, a recognised distinction between ”Jewish” and “Gentile”–as clear as the difference between male and female, or slave and free (see Galatians 3:28).

What we now call “religion” was then more tied up with civic custom, ethnicity, and culture. To be Jewish was equivalent to being Greek, Egyptian, or Syrian–less about what one believed than about which community (and therefore which god) one belonged to. Paul considered himself a Jew and was proud of it. Following his experience on the Damascus road, however, he embarked on a mission to Gentiles: now was the time, prophesied by Isaiah, when all nations would flock to Jerusalem and worship Israel’s God. He called on pagans to abandon their native gods and follow the Jewish God’s Messiah. There was no need, however, to become Jewish–no need for circumcision; they were to remain Gentile.

This process, begun by Paul, of presenting Jewish messianic ideas to a Gentile audience–assigning worldwide significance to the traditions of one particular community–was not straightforward. All sorts of tensions were set up, the results of which are still with us. Having abandoned their former lives to worship the God of Israel, but without becoming Jewish, where did Paul’s Gentile converts now fit? They were stranded in an ethnic no-man’s land. And once Jewish scriptures were declared to be of universal (cross-cultural) importance, what was to happen to the Jewish narrative of a unique communal relationship with their national God? Paul’s perspective was conditioned by his expectation of Christ’s imminent return, leaving these issues of identity unresolved.

But a complex relationship developed between the New Testament’s theology and its sociology.

By the time the Gospels were written, Jesus’s teachings were being relayed in dramatically different contexts from his native Galilee. When Jesus argued with scribes and Pharisees over, say, the observance of Shabbat, these were intra-Jewish debates. Everyone agreed about the significance of Shabbat; the disagreements were over how best to honour it. Many readers of the Gospels, however, were Gentiles, for whom Shabbat was a foreign custom, and who were unsure over whether they were required to keep it. This gave such disputes a new edge. Whatever Jesus may have intended by his parables, they quickly acquired fresh meanings, often reflecting a Christian movement at odds with the majority of Jews.

The theology of the New Testament, even its Christology, is Jewish. It represents one offshoot of the tremendous variety within Second Temple Judaism. But a complex relationship developed between the New Testament’s theology and its sociology. It turned out that its ideas had more traction among Gentiles than Jews. Paul was already aware of the ironies–hence his convoluted, horticulturally suspect, image of the wild olive shoot grafted into the cultivated olive tree (Romans 11:17-24).

The subtext to much of the New Testament is Jewish indifference to the Christian message. When Matthew calls the Pharisees hypocrites (23:13), or implies that God was responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem (22:7), or John has Jesus telling “the Jews” that their father is the devil (8:44), the defamatory polemic is indicative of the predicament Christians found themselves in. They were convinced of having identified the Messiah, and unlocked the key to the Jewish scriptures, but the Jewish community was unresponsive. Today’s Jewish scholars are right to delve beneath the rhetoric, correct the stereotypes, and reconstruct the Jewish viewpoint.

It is intriguing to ponder the motivations of the first Gentile Christians. Something about the Jewish scriptures and Jewish traditions must have attracted them, and Jesus Christ opened up the way for them to be part of the story. But by inserting themselves into that story, they changed it. The New Testament consists of Jewish ideas presented to an increasingly Gentile audience, taken in a direction not recognised by most Jews. And for that lack of recognition, it turns against them.

Things were easier when Jews and Gentiles each had their own god(s). In the New Testament, we see the inception of the struggle between Jews and Christians over the same God. What was to be the future of the God of Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah? Who knew best how to interpret the scriptures? The New Testament read Sunday by Sunday in churches is not a simple record of the Jewish Jesus and the Jewish Paul. It witnesses to the beginnings of Christian identity formation–a convoluted process whereby Jewish concepts were appropriated by outsiders. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity was skewed from the start, and the complications are still with us today.

Featured Image Credit: Christianity by Tama66. Creative Commons via Pixabay.

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