Writer / Observer / Builder — Presence, clarity, and living without a script
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Writer. Observer. Builder. I write from a life shaped by attention, simplicity, and living without a script—through reflective essays, long-form inquiry, and fiction rooted in ordinary lives. I live in rural Alabama, where writing, walking, and building small, intentional spaces are part of the same practice.
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s a novel I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
I’m on my second listen, not sure exactly why.
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
1. Christians can’t agree on who is right, what god wants
When Christians are off to church on a Sunday morning, they might have to drive past a few churches of other denominations. Apparently it never crosses their minds to stop at one of these—after all, “We’re all Christians, aren’t we?” But that’s exactly the problem: Christians have never been able to agree on what Christianity is. They’ve been fighting about this for centuries; the Catholic/Protestant divide is especially pronounced. We can be sure Catholics won’t stop at Protestant churches, and Protestants—with contempt and ridicule for the Vatican—wouldn’t think of stopping at a Catholic church.
There’s a lot of confidence about who is right, based on…what exactly? Based on what authority figures—parents, priests, preachers—have taught the devout from their earliest years. These religious truths become part of life; they constitute the comfort of believing, and, as I heard a Catholic women remark recently, “We were told not to think about it.” Because, when people do think about it, there’s likely to be pushback. It’s no surprise that church membership has been declining, because the world we live in provides so much information that undermines, contradicts, basic Christian beliefs. Professional apologists, in a panic, attempt to rise to this considerable challenge: “We’ve got to show that our brand of the Christian faith is the one true religion!”
2. The devout can’t explain exactly why their beliefs are true
“We were told not to think about it.” Of course, there are so many things that shouldn’t be thought about. For example: “Why am I a devout Baptist or Catholic—instead of something else?” That depends on family and geography. It’s pretty likely, if you were born in Poland, you’ll be Catholic. If you were born in rural Alabama, no surprise if you’re evangelical. If you were born in Egypt, the odds are overwhelming you’d be Muslim. Yet those who have been carefully groomed to believe in the truth of these religions seldom seem to wonder if they’re right, after all—and how to prove it. That’s precisely the danger of thinking about it. “We can’t all be right”—maybe that’s a clue we’re all wrong. Maybe we’ve been misled, deceived by your parents and clergy, who were also carefully groomed. Christians especially, when they look around at so many different brands of the own religion, should realize that something is terribly wrong: the faulty grooming has gone on for hundreds of years.
Many years ago, when I was a Methodist minister in small towns, it was not unusual for the clergy to arrange ecumenical services. That is, there would be a grand mixing of the congregations of the various denominations, Catholic and several Protestant. This was done to show how much the followers of Jesus loved each other, and got along. It was show business, because, in truth, the clergy who presided, and the parishioners who showed up, held very different ideas about god and Jesus. The clergy were always very cordial with each other, but we dared not actually discuss theology!
Nor did we dare to wonder how to demonstrate which of the various Christian brands was actually the right one—the one that Jesus or the apostle Paul would have said, “Yes, that’s it!” Not that this could ever happen: there is so much theological incoherence in the New Testament; Paul’s theology, which we read in his letters, was hopelessly messed up—and we have no way of verifying anything attributed to Jesus in the gospels.
It would be many years later—in 2013—that John Loftus published his book, The Outsider Test of Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True. It’s really not rocket science: step back from your faith and evaluate it the same way you would other religions you deem to the faulty, inferior.
But Christians have been trained not to think about it. Hence when Mormon missionaries or Jehovah’s Witnesses come knocking at the door, most Christians send them on their way, giving no thought whatever to how they could show conclusively that these religions are wrong—while their own brand of faith is the right one. This would require a grasp of epistemology: that is, how can you verify that your ways of knowing about god are reliable? “Well, I’m sure my parents and clergy told me the truth” doesn’t work at all. Did these authority figures make any effort at all to verify that their ways of knowing about god were reliable? It’s vital to break the endless cycle of “someone else told me.” All the claimed ways for knowing about god are, in fact, unreliable and defective: revelations (e.g. scripture), visions, prayers, meditations. Most religions rely on these various mediums—and come up with vastly different understandings of god.
If the outsider test of faith is applied rigorously to one’s own faith, there is little hope that this faith will measure up. Note that we’re not looking for proof: we’re asking the devout to provide reliable, verifiable, objective data about god(s).
3. In recent years, the Christian mess has become an even bigger mess
John Loftus’ 2013 book, mentioned above—and about a dozen of his other books—is part of a much larger phenomenon. Since the year 2000, well more than 500 books have been published explaining, in detail, the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. Books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), and Sam Harris (The End of Faith) were instrumental in launching, or at least stimulating, this surge in atheist publishing. But books are only part of a much bigger picture: “The Internet is where religion comes to die” —I’ve seen this attributed to various people—but it means that information about the harmful impact religion, and its feeble foundations, is so easily accessible. There are countless blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels devoted to explaining just how bad and faulty religion is. Of course, apologists have risen to this challenge; they have their own blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels. But atheism has found its voice as never before.
So the clergy have to make their way in this new, hostile, environment. It’s no surprise they’re not doing all that well. This recent headline caught my attention—where else, on the Internet:
“The overall health of pastors in the U.S. has declined markedly since 2015, with increasing numbers who say that they face declining respect from their community and a lack of true friends, according to a recent study.”
“Data collected by faith-based organization Barna Group as part of its Resilient Pastor research showed a significant decrease in pastors’ spiritual, mental and emotional well-being, as well as their overall quality of life, between 2015 and 2022, the group announced last week.”
“Pastors who reported that their mental and emotional health was below average spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excellent mental and emotional health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.”
“The recent report dovetails with another poll that Barna released last March that showed the rates of burnout among pastors had risen dramatically within the past year, with a staggering 42% of ministers wondering if they should abandon their vocation altogether amid unsustainable stress and loneliness.”
“…declining respect from their community…” “…amid unsustainable stress and loneliness.”
This should surprise no one. Mainline Protestant denominations have been declining for years, and the most conservative brands of Christianity have brought no end of embarrassment. Who could have imagined the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump? How does it possibly make sense that the folks most devoted to god—well, they would have us believe it—turned this corrupt, evil person into a hero of the faith? Some have given up on him, but he still commands a large following. Moreover American democracy is under threat from these fanatics who want to abolish separation of church and state, who are eager to institute a theocracy. Because, you know, they are the only ones who are right about god. How could Pat Robertson be wrong when he blamed 9/11 on homosexuality and abortion?
How can Catholic clergy maintain morale in the face of the ongoing scandal of child-rape? The headlines about new cases keep coming. Most priests are not pedophiles—well, we certainly hope not—but the reputation of their church has been tarnished beyond repair. The church has paid out billions of dollars in legal settlements. Even worse—if that’s possible—are the theological implications: is it not within the power of their god to intervene somehow when a priest is about to rape a child? How can the good clergy face their congregations? Trying to maintain holy celibacy must contribute to unsustainable stress and loneliness.
Yet another example of the Christian mess: the Catholic church is evil enough because it champions misogyny—female priests? No, never! —is okay with homophobia, condemns contraception and abortion in the poorest of countries, and sits on enormous wealth. But in many parts of the world, it has been losing ground—no doubt because of the clergy-rape outrage—to an even more evil brand, Pentecostalism, which fully embraces ancient superstitions: the last thing the world needs. This can only bring grief to well-educated clergy.
I wonder how many folks in the pews really pay attention to the sermons. Do they wonder: Is the preacher right about that point? Are they encouraged to get right on their cell-phone—before church is even over—and see if Google can provide them with answers? If people did that, and discovered that theobabble from the pulpit cannot be trusted at all, I suspect that the clergy would feel even more declining respect from their community.
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s an episode from The Essential Guide to Writing a Novel
Here’s a novel I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
I’m on my second listen, not sure exactly why.
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
We atheists are asked to imagine what would convince us that Christianity is true. The short answer is this: We need sufficient objective evidence that can transform the negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible into verified eyewitness testimony. But it does not exist. Given the extraordinary nature of the miracle tales in the Bible, this requirement means the past has to be changed and that can’t be done. Let’s explore this.
Consider the Christian belief in the virgin-birthed deity. Just ask for the objective evidence. There is no objective evidence to corroborate the Virgin Mary’s story. We hear nothing about her wearing a misogynistic chastity belt to prove her virginity. No one checked for an intact hymen before she gave birth, either. After Jesus was born, Maury Povich wasn’t there with a DNA test to verify Joseph was not the baby daddy. We don’t even have first-hand testimonial evidence for it since the story is related to us by others, not by Mary or Joseph. At best, all we have is second-hand testimony by one person, Mary, as reported in two later anonymous gospels, or two people if we include Joseph, who was incredulously convinced Mary was a virgin because of a dream–yes, a dream (see Matthew 1:19-24).[1] We never get to independently cross-examine Mary and Joseph, or the people who knew them, which we would need to do since they may have a very good reason for lying (pregnancy out of wedlock, anyone?).
Now one might simply trust the anonymous Gospel writers who wrote down this miraculous tale, but why? How is it possible they could find out that a virgin named Mary gave birth to a deity? Think about how they would go about researching that. No reasonable investigation could take Mary’s word for it, or Joseph’s word. With regard to Joseph’s dream, Thomas Hobbes tells us, “For a man to say God hath spoken to him in a Dream, is no more than to say he dreamed that God spake to him; which is not of force to win belief from any man” (Leviathan, chap. 32.6). So the testimonial evidence is down to one person, Mary, which is still second-hand testimony at best. Why should we believe that testimony?
Christian believers accept ancient 2nd 3rd 4th 5th handed-down testimony to the virgin birth of Jesus, but they would never believe two people who claimed to see a virgin give birth to an incarnate god in today’s world!
On this fact, Christian believers are faced with a serious dilemma. If this is the kind of research that went into writing the Gospel of Matthew–by taking Mary’s word and Joseph’s dream as evidence–then we shouldn’t believe anything else we find in that Gospel without corroborating objective evidence. The lack of evidence for Mary’s story speaks directly to the credibility of the Gospel narrative as a whole. There’s no good reason to believe the virgin birth myth, so there’s no good reason to believe the resurrection myth either, since the claim of Jesus’ bodily resurrection is first told in that Gospel.[2]
In a recent online discussion fundamentalist apologist Lydia McGrew suggested I got it wrong. Her knee jerk reaction to me was that the author of Matthew’s gospel merely reported that Joseph’s dream convinced him Mary’s tale was true, and nothing more. But if so, why is Joseph’s dream included in Matthew’s gospel at all? It doesn’t do anything to lead reasonable people to accept Mary’s story, as her testimony would still stand alone without any support. It would be tantamount to showing that Joseph was incredulously convinced by less than what a reasonable person should accept. So what? It would also encourage readers to consider their own dreams as convincing on other issues.
So let us imagine what could have been…
If an overwhelming number of Jews in first-century Palestine had become Christians that would’ve helped. They believed in their God. They believed their God did miracles. They knew their Old Testament prophecies. They hoped for a Messiah/King based on these prophecies.[3] We’re even told they were beloved by their God! Yet the overwhelming majority of those first-century Jews did not believe Jesus was raised from the dead.[4] They were there and they didn’t believe. So why should we?
If I could go back in time to watch Jesus coming out of a tomb that would work. But I can’t travel back in time. If someone recently found some convincing objective evidence dating to the days of Jesus, that would work. But I can’t imagine what kind of evidence that could be. As I’ve argued, uncorroborated testimonial evidence alone wouldn’t work, so an authenticated handwritten letter from the mother of Jesus would be insufficient. If a cell phone was discovered and dated to the time of Jesus containing videos of him doing miracles, that would work. But this is just as unlikely as his resurrection. If Jesus, God, or Mary were to appear to me, that would work. But that has never happened even in my believing days, and there’s nothing I can do to make it happen either. Several atheists have suggested other scenarios that would work, but none of them have panned out.[5]
Believers will cry foul, complaining that the kind of objective evidence needed to believe cannot be found, as if we concocted this need precisely to deny miracles. But this is simply what reasonable people need. If that’s the case, then that’s the case. Bite the bullet. It’s not our fault it doesn’t exist. Once honest inquirers admit the objective evidence doesn’t exist, they should stop complaining and be honest about its absence. It’s that simple. Since reasonable people need this evidence, God is to be blamed for not providing it. Why would a God create us as reasonable people and then not provide what reasonable people need? Reasonable people should always think about these matters in accordance to the probabilities based on the strength of the objective evidence.
Believers will object that I haven’t stated any criteria for identifying what qualifies as extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary miraculous claim. But I know what does not count. Second-, third-, or fourth-hand hearsay testimony doesn’t count. Nor does circumstantial evidence. Nor does anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events, which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings, private experiences, or inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence. Neither do claims that one’s writings are inspired, divinely communicated through dreams, or were seen in visions. That should be good enough. Chasing the definitional demand for specific criteria sidetracks us away from that which matters. Concrete suggestions matter. But if Christians want more they should learn to examine the miracle claims in the Bible from the perspective of a historian.[6]
If nothing else, a God who desired our belief could have waited until our present technological age to perform miracles, because people in this scientific age of ours need to see the evidence. If a God can send the savior Jesus in the first century, whose death supposedly atoned for our sins and atoned for all the sins of the people in the past, prior to his day, then that same God could have waited to send Jesus to die in the year 2023. Doing so would bring salvation to every person born before this year, too, which just adds twenty centuries of people to save.
In today’s world it would be easy to provide objective evidence of the Gospel miracles. Magicians and mentalists would watch Jesus to see if he could fool them, like what Penn & Teller do on their show. There would be thousands of cell phones that could document his birth, life, death, and resurrection. The raising of Lazarus out of his tomb would go viral. We could set up a watch party as Jesus was being put into his grave to document everything all weekend, especially his resurrection. We could ask the resurrected Jesus to tell us things that only the real Jesus could have known or said before he died. Photos could be compared. DNA tests could be conducted on the resurrected body of Jesus, which could prove his resurrection, if we first snatched the foreskin of the baby Jesus long before his death. Plus, everyone in the world could watch as his body ascended back into the heavenly sky above, from where it was believed he came down to earth.
Christian believers say their God wouldn’t make his existence that obvious. But if their God had wanted to save more people, as we read he did (2 Peter 3:9), then it’s obvious he should’ve waited until our modern era to do so. For the evidence could be massive. If nothing else, their God had all of this evidence available to him, but chose not to use any of it, even though with the addition of each unit of evidence, more people would be saved.
It’s equally obvious that if a perfectly good, omnipotent God wanted to be hidden, for some hidden reason, we should see some evidence of this. But outside the apologetical need to explain away the lack of objective evidence for faith, we don’t find it. For there are a number of events taking place daily in which such a God could alleviate horrendous suffering without being detected. God could’ve stopped the underwater earthquake that caused the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami before it happened, thus saving a quarter of a million lives. Then, with a perpetual miracle God could’ve kept it from ever happening in the future. If God did this, none of us would ever know that he did. Yet he didn’t do it. Since there are millions of clear instances like this one, where a theistic God didn’t alleviate horrendous suffering even though he could do so without being detected, we can reasonably conclude that a God who hides himself doesn’t exist. If nothing else, a God who doesn’t do anything about the most horrendous cases of suffering doesn’t do anything about the lesser cases of suffering either, or involve himself in our lives.[7]
In any case, imagining some nonexistent evidence that could convince us Mary gave birth to a divine son sired by a male god in the ancient superstitious world is a futile exercise, since we already know there’s no objective evidence for it. One might as well imagine what would convince us that Marshall Applewhite, of the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult, was telling the truth in 1997 that an extraterrestrial spacecraft following the comet Hale-Bopp was going to beam their souls up to it, if they would commit suicide with him. One might even go further to imagine what would convince us that he and his followers are flying around the universe today! Such an exercise would be utter tomfoolery, because faith is tomfoolery.
Anthropology professor James T. Houk has said, “Virtually anything and everything, no matter how absurd, inane, or ridiculous, has been believed or claimed to be true at one time or another by somebody, somewhere in the name of faith.”[8] This is exactly what we find when Christians believe on less than sufficient objective evidence.
——–
[1] Joseph’s dream is used in the Gospel of Matthew’s narrative to help explain why Mary was not put to death for dishonoring him because of adultery. There are five other dreams in this gospel account which were all intended to save someone’s life. So, Joseph’s dream was probably meant to save Mary’s life too (Matthew 1:19-23; 2:12; 2:19-23; & 27:19). Matthew J. Marohl shows in Joseph’s Dilemma: “Honor Killing” in the Birth Narrative of Matthew (Wipf & Stock Publisher, 2008), that “Joseph’s dilemma involves the possibility of an honor killing. If Joseph reveals that Mary is pregnant, she will be killed. If Joseph conceals Mary’s pregnancy, he will be opposing the law of the Lord. What is a ‘righteous’ man to do?” Marohl: “Early Christ-followers understood Joseph’s dilemma to involve an assumption of adultery and the subsequent possibility of the killing of Mary.” This was part of their culture. Honor killings were justified in both the Old and New Testaments. Jesus even agreed with the Mosaic Law (Exodus 21:17; Leviticus 20:9) against his opponents on behalf of honor killings of children who dishonored their parents (Mark 7:8-13). The tale of the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus exposes the hypocrisy of her accusers, doesn’t change what Jesus thinks of the law either (John 8; Matthew 5:18).
Don’t be surprised by the possibility of honor killings. Jesus affirmed their legitimacy. The Pharisees accused Jesus of being too lenient in his observance of the law. So Jesus counterpunches them in Mark 7:9-12: “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God) then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother.” (NIV) Corban is an Aramaic word that refers to a sacrifice, oath, or gift to God. The Pharisees allowed for this loophole so someone could make an oath to offer a gift to the temple, like one would set up a trust fund, in order to avoid giving it for the care of one’s aging parents.
Jesus’ first scriptural quote to “Honor your father and mother” is one of the Ten Commandments. Jesus’ second scriptural quote that “Anyone who curses (literally dishonors) their father or mother is to be put to death”, is found in Ex. 21:17 and Lev. 20:9. Jesus says the Corban loophole sets aside these two commands of God. For such a son would be disobeying a direct command of God by dishonoring his parents, while the Pharisees would be disobeying God’s command by not putting him to death. Deuteronomy 21:18-21 elaborates (i.e., the second law): “If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his town are to stone him to death.”
In this Jesus is affirming the Old Testament law of honor killings by stoning, for only if both of the laws Jesus cites are to be obeyed can his analogy succeed, that the Pharisees have set aside the laws of God in order to observe their traditions. For more on the harms of Christianity see my anthology, Christianity is not Great (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014).
[2] On the resurrection, see Loftus, The Case against Miracles (United Kingdom: Hypatia Press, 2019), chapter 17.
[3] To see how early Christian’s misused Old Testament prophecy, see Robert J. Miller’s excellent book, Helping Jesus Fulfill Prophecy (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015).
[4] The most plausible estimate of the first-century Jewish population comes from a census of the Roman Empire during the reign of Claudius (48 CE) that counted nearly 7 million Jews. See the entry “Population” in Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 13. In Palestine there may have been as many as 2.5 million Jews. See Magen Broshi, “Estimating the Population of Ancient Jerusalem.” Biblical Archaeological Review Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1978): 10-15. Despite these numbers, Catholic New Testament scholar David C. Sim shows that “Throughout the first century the total number of Jews in the Christian movement probably never exceeded 1,000.” See How Many Jews Became Christians in the First Century: The Failure of the Christian Mission to the Jews.Hervormde Teologiese Studies Vol. 61, No. 1/2 (2005): 417-440.
[8] James T. Houk, The Illusion of Certainty (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2017), p. 16.
————–
John W. Loftus is a philosopher and counter-apologist credited with 12 critically acclaimed books, including The Case against Miracles, God and Horrendous Suffering, and Varieties of Jesus Mythicism. Please support DC by sharing our posts, or by subscribing,donating, or buying our books at Amazon. As an Amazon Associate John earns a small amount of money from any purchases made there. Buying anything through them helps fund the work here, and is greatly appreciated!
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s an episode from The Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris
Here’s a novel I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
I’m on my second listen, not sure exactly why.
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s a writing craft podcast I’m listening to: The Essential Guide to Writing a Novel
Here’s a novel I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
I’m on my second listen, not sure exactly why.
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
Richard L. Fricks 
