Undusted Texts

Great is the power of fasting.  Moreover, so beauteous is its bravery that fasting delights even Christ: so strong, that it leads men to heaven.  And, to use human rather than divine examples,  a voice sent forth from the mouth of the fasting Elijah closed heaven, due to the sacrilege of the people of the Jews (1 Kgs 17:1).  So, too, when an altar to an idol was set up by King Ahab (1 Kgs 16:32), at the word of the prophet, for three years and six months, the dew of rain did not fall upon the earth.   A worthy punishment which fittingly restrains intemperance: that heaven would be closed to the impious who polluted earthly things.   Worthy, indeed, that, at the condemnation of the king’s sacrilege, the prophet was sent to the widow in Sarepta of Sidon,  who, since she offered devotion through food, merited that she alone would not feel the distress of the public aridity.   Therefore, the jug of barley did not lack, when the torrent’s flows we...

 I originally started this blog over a decade ago, when I was just a student and had much more time for writing.  Business of life (and a feeling that no one was reading this blog anyway) led me to give it up and leave the field fallow for almost a decade.  Now, though, I feel it is time to restart it, with a bit of a different focus: the main posts will now be translations. A major question might be: why revive a ten-year-defunct blog for a somewhat new venture?  Why not simply start fresh, with a clean slate?  That's typical nowadays: a new brand for a new venture. First, there is the simple fact that there might still be a few old-time readers of the blog around, to give a few views; second, there is the fact that the amount of content already here might give a bump in search engines (though I don't know much about how SEO has changed in the last ten years).  Yet those are simply small, practical matters, only really useful if I cared much about earning ...