malvasia bianca

In a role-playing game, you customize your character’s abilities, refining that customization as the game progresses. Your character will typically have a class (fighter, mage, priest, rogue, etc.), which you pick at the start of the game and generally doesn’t change; this sets broad limits of your character’s abilities. You also typically have cross-class attributes […]

Beginnings As soon as Disney’s acquisition of Playdom closed, e-mails from recruiters started appearing regularly in my inbox. Most of them I essentially ignored: I’d been having a great time at Playdom, and while I didn’t expect to stay there for the six years that I’d stayed in my previous job, I certainly wasn’t planning […]

If you’ve been wondering at the slow pace of updates here, part of the reason is that a low-key job search suddenly got a lot hotter over the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, it’s over now: I’ll be joining Sumo Logic on February 21st. More info to come eventually…

And now I’ve come to the end of Matthew. (Phew!) Many thanks to those of you who have read this far and commented, especially to Roger for his many insights. (And I apologize if I mischaracterize his point of view below.) I came in expecting to dislike a lot of what I read, and I […]

I’m a bit confused by the parts involving Pontius Pilate. Some of that is simple ignorance: I understand that the Jewish priests don’t like Jesus, but I don’t understand why the Roman governor should care. And the part with the crowd clamoring for Pilate to free Barabbas doesn’t ring true to me. (E.g. the crowd […]

A fascinating chapter, because of the humanity that pervades it. The chief priests are the bad guys, but while I don’t defend their actions, I can see where they’re coming from: Jesus was really laying into them a few chapters ago. And Jesus knows what’s coming, so he doesn’t turn away the “very precious ointment” […]

Matthew 24 is one long, misguided prophecy of Jesus’s return: you have to believe, don’t be led astray by rumors or false prophets or doubts, and while we don’t know exactly when God is going to come and take away the just, nonetheless “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all […]

Matthew 21 starts with the bit about the ass and the colt, and then moves on to casting the moneychangers out of the temple (“My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves”, from Matthew 21:13), and Jesus’s withering a fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22). The former […]

I wasn’t aware of the parable that takes up the first half of chapter 20, but now I’m fascinated by it. It presents a group of laborers who worked for different amounts of time, but all got paid the same; the longer-working laborers complained, but got the following response, from Matthew 20:13-15: Friend, I do […]

The endgame may be approaching, but we take another break from that here and return to our moralizing. Which starts off in a rather charming fashion, extolling the virtues of children! (A much more pleasant idea than staining them with original sin…) I wish the strongest statements weren’t in support only of “these little ones […]

The tone deepens here. We start with themes we’ve seen before, with others who are engaging him but don’t want to believe. His response is to look around: “O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?” (from Matthew 16:3). But note the […]

We start off with a defense against narrow rules: in Matthew 15:2, the scribes and Pharisees ask “Why do thy disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? for they wash not their hands when they eat bread.” And Jesus’s answer is Matthew 15:11, “Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that […]

Next, we come to a chapter full of parables. Which I was expecting to like, because I’m quite fond of stories these days; but these parables, not so much. Instead, they’re just different variants of “here are the good guys, here are the bad guys”, and while I find that less distasteful in parable form […]

We start with a discussion of what is permissible on the sabbath and what isn’t. Which, if I’m in a good mood, I’m happy to take as a caution against uncritically using rigid laws to prevent you from doing good; e.g. Matthew 12:11, “And he said unto them, What man shall there be among you, […]

Here, Jesus shows the virtues of delegation; I can certainly get behind that. I can also get behind limiting that delegation to a small group that you know well, and accepting that you don’t have sufficient resources to be able to help everybody. I’m not so thrilled with the “my way or the highway” (actually, […]

And now we take a break from the context-free sermonizing, and turn to narrative. Specifically, about Jesus curing people right and left; hard not to like that! And, consistent with what we’ve seen earlier, he doesn’t want word getting around about his actions. (Though, as you might expect, it didn’t really work out that way…) […]

A third chapter of moralization, and one of my favorites. It starts off in top form, enough so that I’ll quote all of Matthew 7:1-5 to you: Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to […]

Another chapter of moralizing, and again I have mixed feelings. I like the message about not doing good deeds for the purpose of being seen: but, to me, the message of “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the […]

This is where we really start seeing moral pronouncements laid down. First, a sequence of “Blessed are the X: for they shall Y” lines, where X is generally something that’s good (or, at least, causes your life to be difficult), and where Y is a reward for that. In general, I support the X’s (sometimes […]

Repenting your sins is all well and good; I can’t get behind the naked threats in Matthew 3, though. Take Matthew 3:12, “Whose fan is in his hand, and he will throughly purge his floor, and gather his wheat into the garner; but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.” Even if you […]