It's the worst "Song of Solomon" on mushrooms mated with the sad, raped memory of Walt Whitman ever. Gah.

And I gotta wonder what kind of breasts this guy saw to use cheese as a metaphoric descriptor. Arrrrrooo?

Maybe it was inspired by this and he did not realize it was supposed to be humor: [link]

So I've been working on my new garden, and plant names are making me think about a Tolkien garden:

• Sea Holly “Blue Hobbit“ [link]
Dahlia “Black Wizard“ [link]
• Periscaria “Red Dragon“ [link]
• Rockcress “Treasure“ [link]
• Kobold is German for “goblin.” [link]
• And there’s the “dwarf” variety of anything
• but Gaillardia “Dwarf Goblin” is even better [link]
• dELFinium might be pushing it, but trollius and spiderwort seem good
• Orange Gnome beats putting in a garden gnome

Salon's got an interesting interview with Bart Ehrman that's worth the read.

but Gaillardia “Dwarf Goblin” is even better

It's a pretty flower, but the name suggests unfortunate liaisons in the Mines of Moria.

I love your garden, Raq! (With or without unfortunate liasons)

I have an Elsie Dinsmore-inspired question about baptism that the internet doesn't seem to provide an answer for. Throughout these books, someone is referred to as a Christian if they've had an experience where they've accepted Jesus. There are a few different times and ways that we see this happen -- Elsie's father suddenly accepts Jesus after Elsie dies (and then she comes back to life); Elsie tells a dying slave about how Jesus will love her and let her into heaven if she just believes -- she doesn't have to do anything but believe, and even a sinner like her will go to heaven; and, in what seemed to me to be one of the odder ones, Elsie's uncle Walter, before joining the army to go fight in the Civil War, decides that he wants to be prepared for death first, so he takes a week to go to another plantation where he knows he'll have some privacy and reads the Bible and thinks about it until he suddenly realizes that believing is all he has to do, and after this, he tells the housekeeper that he can't figure out why he didn't understand this earlier, since it all seems so obvious now.

But baptism isn't mentioned in any of these stories. From other things I'd read, I'd thought that people who believe in that sort of experience with coming to accept Jesus also believe in being baptized once they did believe. There are quite a few kids born in these books, and no mention of babies being baptized, either. So, I guess my basic question is, am I wrong about what Christians believe about baptism? Would the author (who was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister) have just left out the baptism scenes, or is there something else going on?

Hil, some Christian religions, like Catholics, believe in baptism for babies, and others believe in waiting until they are adults and come to a moment of belief, I think. I know far less about the latter, being Catholic, so I don't know if that helps at all.

Elsie is definitely not Catholic. (Elsie, in fact, dies from a fever brought on by her fear of being sent to a convent school.) I knew that some believe in baptism for adults and some for babies, but neither seems to happen in this series. From what I know of Christianity, I thought that baptism was a pretty important thing, so it seems odd that it wasn't mentioned at all.

Baptism is another bone of much contention. Catholics believed that infant baptism was necessary for salvation, which led to increasingly complicated theories about limbo because of people having trouble buying into the idea of throwing day-old babies into the fires of hell. This is something that evolved over time, since there's no mention of infant baptism in the Bible.

Infant baptism was one of the things that early Protestant movements were protesting against. Both the Anabaptist and the Baptist movements believed in baptism of adult believers. Adult baptism signified becoming part of the church membership, but most sects that believe in adult baptism don't believe baptism is necessary to salvation. Depending on the church, you can be saved by faith alone or be saved by faith and good works. Other Protestant groups (Calvinism, for one) believe in infant baptism, but they believe its purpose is to mark as child as a Christian, not for the purpose of salvation.

IIRC, Elsie's beliefs reflected the evangelical beliefs of the Second Great Awakening, which focused both on a personal relationship with god and on social justice.

(This is very off the top of my head and some beer.)