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At 03:31 PM 9/21/99 +0200, Paul Spice wrote: >It is a difficult thing for a 20th century scholar (for are we not all >scholars on this list?) to see through the eyes of a medieval farmer! >Christianity offers a basic framework for a belief system, but what >illiterate farmers thought a thousand years ago is hard to discover. I I have noticed -- and this is not personally directed at anyone on this list -- that there is often an *enormous* disconnect between academics and non-academics and other non-"intellectuals". I particularly notice this because I have spent most of my life in the rural South and I am not an academic. Due to family roots in rural clergy (back to ca. 1800) and to being a fourth-generation college graduate on another side, I am probably as close as one can come to a rural Southern non-academic intellectual. (Incidentally, my grandparents on both sides were the first generation completely off the farm.) Religion permeates Southern culture. We do have secular humanists and atheists down here, but they are usually academics: religion is an integral part of Southern life and Southern culture no matter what one's personal beliefs or attendance at organized religious events. (I am a convert to Catholicism: the majority of my family are non-Fundamentalist Protestants.) >recently read in one of Dr. Muessig's "feast days" that a certain Christian >martyr died because he/she would not eat the blood of animals. This is not >now part of the Christian belief, but is and was a mainstay of Muslim It is also a mainstay of Orthodox (and Medieval) Judaism. It may also be personal preference: I love German food, but I wouldn't touch blood sausage or blood pudding. Elizabeth Whitaker %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%