Alsoft Disk Warrior seems to have saved the day again; really, I can’t imagine a Mac-based household without a copy. I rebuilt my directory, did some uninstalling and reinstalling, and everything seems to be working.
That’s especially good since I’m preaching this week at St. Luke’s. The readings include the Ten Commandments (the Exodus version), Psalm 19:7-14 (“The Law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul”), Romans 7:13-25 (Paul’s vexations relative to explaining the Law’s role in human life and sin), and John 2:13-25 (John’s version of the cleansing of the Temple — a real outlier among these). I suppose I’ll preach about the Law; I’ll try not to repeat the same old things I usually say about the Law, but it’s hard not to. Christian congregations have been so thoroughly conditioned to approach the Torah on one of several oversimplified models (none of them particularly respectful to Judaism) that it’s hard to escape a sense of obligation to make audible, make visible a different way of thinking through these theological problems). We’ll see. I haven’t even checked to see whether there’s a sermon in my files that I might refurbish for Sunday’s use.
A lot of that hard-disk trouble going around … the internal hard drive in my PowerBook died completely last week. I’m working now off of a combination of external drives, so at least I can do email and the web — but my only word processing is via Text Edit. I’m looking for someplace to send my PowerBook for data recovery from the internal drive (I’m optimistic — I think it was a drive motor failure, so it should be as simple as mounting the actual disk from my drive in a working mechanism — but darn these services are expensive!).
So I guess I should get DiskWarrior, no? And do you use backup software at all? What would you recommend?
I forgot to say in my last comment that this week’s lectionary blog entry might be helpful to you — in it, I say that Jesus isn’t siding with “Christianity” (which would, of course, be anachronistic) against Judaism, but with prophets like Isaiah against the pro-king and pro-Temple strain of the tradition. In other words, this is an intra-Jewish conflict, and Jesus’ position in it is hardly original, though it does have some serious implications for issues we’re facing today.
I’ll try not to repeat the same old things I usually say about the Law, but it’s hard not to.
I’ve got a similar feeling going: I’m preaching on a day when, again, we edit the psalm for easier consumption (in this case, getting all drooly over the “covenant,” but cutting it off before the psalm points out that this is a specific covenant, with Abraham, concerning the land). So my mental first draft is yet another, “How about we find a more challenging mode for Christian reading of the OT besides the old cut-and-paste? Yes, you heard me, it’s this again…”