[Magdalen] 2020d

[Allan Carr]

l read a book about tree communities years ago, The Hidden Life of Trees. One thing I remember is that trees talk to each other, very very slowly, hormonally and chemically through their roots.  They actually have a collective intelligence, like a bee or ant colony. I love these strange, at least to me, facts.

I ordered Ehrman’s Jesus Before The Gospels. Amazon suggested a couple of more Ehrman books which I didn’t think I had read so I went hog wild and, it being late, ordered all three (each was a fairly cheap paperback!). That will, undoubtedly, be a surfeit of Ehrman.

Thank you for your email, and thanks to everyone who responded to my birthday email. I was genuinely touched.

I think my problem with books was my attempt to only read and listen using a Kindle. I’ll try real books from now on, if only paperbacks. Maybe that will restore my reading habit.

Once again, thanks to you all.

Allan Carr


> On Jan 7, 2020, at 2:09 PM, cady soukup <cadyasoukup at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Happy Leap Year Birthday Allan!
> 
> May you continue to find enjoyable moments in the midst of the tangled
> web that is living. May blessings find you and Camille this year,
> however unexpected or small they may be.
> 
> I am both TV- and movie-impaired - the bulk of them are no longer
> compelling to watch, so I read instead. Recent books that have have
> enjoyed include
> 
> "To Speak for the Trees" by Diana Beresford-Kroeger - a meditation on
> a life of living, researching, and working with trees and their
> communities.
> 
> "The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History
> in the Old South" by Michael W. Twitty - still reading this one -
> amazing breadth & depth of old ways of life, history, and cooking, and
> how it all works together).
> 
> "Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered,
> Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior" by Bart Ehrman - an
> examination of how personal and cultural memory works and how it
> intersects with story/history.
> 
> Yes, I tend to read more than one book at a time.
> 
> May the Epiphany season be kind to us all, there is quite enough going
> on in the public sector to need large doses of kindnesses given and
> received just to make it through each day!
> 
> hugs anyway - Cady
> 
>>