"Just as he was"

Hessische Landesbibliothek, MS 1640

"And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was" (Mk 4:36 (N)RSV, italics mine).

1.  without further ado; i.e. without first, say, returning "home" to Capernaum (3:19; 2:1; 1:21).

2.  as per the emergency plan (3:9).  But the plan had already been executed, for Jesus had long since stepped into the boat and sat down (4:1).

3.  as per an improvisation on the emergency plan (3:9).  This, with no. 1, seems to me the most likely historical sense.  Jesus, following the emergency plan, had long since stepped into the boat and sat down (4:1).  The disciples, by contrast, are with the crowd on land.  Jesus says, "'Let us go across to the other side.'"  They leave the crowd (4:36 and two variants), step into the boat, and "t[ake] him with them in [it], just as he [had been]" (4:36).  Before long he lays down in the stern and falls fast asleep.  Hence:

4.  exhausted as he was (4:38).  Exhausted, pressed by the crowd (3:9), and threatened—albeit in sleep—by the storm (4:37).  I.e., as supremely vulnerable as he was.  This seems to me to be a legitimate figurative sense, a sense that stands then in marked contrast with the flash of divinity displayed from v. 39 (cf. 1:27).  "just as he was," i.e. fully man and, as it turned out, fully God.

"'If I have accomplished anything in my life,' she said late in her life, 'it is because I wasn’t embarrassed to talk about God.'"

     Dorothy Day, according to Jim Forest in

• "Dorothy Day," in The Encyclopedia of American Catholic history, ed. Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1997), 414 (my thanks to Priscilla Pope-Levison for that reference), which reads, "'If I have achieved anything in my life,' she once remarked, 'it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.'"
• "Dorothy Day — a saint for our age?," a presentation to the Dorothy Day Centenary Conference, Marquette University, October 10, 1997,
• "The trouble with Saint Dorothy," U.S. Catholic 62, no. (November 1, 1997):  18-23, and
• "Dorothy Day:  saint and troublemaker," Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement:  centenary essays (Milwaukee, WI:  Marquette University Press, 2001), 581 (576-587).

Forest, "a member of the New York Catholic Worker c[o]mmunity in the early 1960s" (611) who lived with Dorothy Day and knew her well, cites nothing.  I have not looked further.

"if [you] can't get the little things right, [you] can't be trusted on the big ones."

"Citations protect you from a charge of plagiarism, but beyond that narrow self-interest, correct citations contribute to your ethos.  First, readers don't trust sources they can't find.  If they can't find your sources because you failed to document them adequately, they won't trust your evidence; and if they don't trust your evidence, they won't trust . . . you.  Second, . . . if a writer can't get the little things right, he can't be trusted on the big ones."

     Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup, and William T. Fitzgerald, The craft of research, 4th ed. (Chicago & London:  The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 203.

Christianity and classical culture

"the whole of this discussion may be summed up in the following syllogism.  The Greeks give us the major premise:  If such gods are to be worshipped, then certainly such men may be honoured.  The Romans add the minor:  But such men must be no means be honoured.  The Christians draw the conclusion:  Therefore such gods must by no means be worshipped."

     St. Augustine, City of God II.13, trans. Dodds.  CSEL 40.1, p. 77 ll. 2-7:

In hac disceptatione huiusce modi ratiocinatio summam quaestionis absoluit.  Proponunt Graeci:  Si di tales colendi sunt, profecto etiam tales homines honorandi.  Adsumunt Romani:  Sed nullo modo tales homines honorandi sunt.  Concludunt Christiani:  Nullo modo igitur di tales colendi sunt.

The Copenhagen School

     "But everything that Bohr and his circle [(the Copenhagen School so imperiously)] believed about these matters turns out to have been wrong.  Everything that they declared to be impossible has actually been accomplished."

     David Z. Albert, Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, "Quantum's leaping lizards," a review of What is real?  The unfinished quest for the meaning of quantum physics, by Adam Becker, The New York review of books 65, no. 7 (April 19, 2018):  56 (55-57).  See this article, on file under Quantum physics, for the implications, among them that "Each of ['a number of promising theories of what things are "actually like" in the interiors of atoms'] entails that the world is very different from anything that we had imagined before, but what's important for our purposes is that each of them offers us some realistic and comprehensive account of how nature actually is, whether anybody happens to be looking at it or not.  None of these theories requires that we draw any line or make any distinctions, between whatever is being measured and whatever is doing the measuring" (56), etc.  "One of the upshots of the story that Becker tells [(namely, the story that Einstein was 'flawed', 'proud and stubborn', unprepared 'to followed where that new science led', unprepared 'to believe that nature might refuse to accomodate itself to his intutions')] is that this is all nonsense.  Einstein was out of step with his fellow physicists for the simple reason that he thought more clearly and spoke more honestly than they did" (57).

Scipio "did not consider that republic flourishing whose walls stand, but whose morals are in ruins."

"Neque enim censebat ille felicem esse rem publicam stantibus moenibus, ruentibus moribus."

     St. Augustine, City of God I.33, trans. Dodds.  CSEL 40.1, p. 56 ll. 13-14.  Scipio did not consider that republic happy with standing walls, ruined morals.

'The appointment of a woman to office is an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.'

     President Thomas Jefferson to Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, 13 January 180 (Founders Online).  "when Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin noticed a shortage of individuals qualified to hold office during the second Jefferson administration, he suggested that the president consider hiring women.  President Jefferson, taking his role as the symbol of the nation to heart, replied," (Annette Gordon-Reed, "Female trouble," The New York review of books 65, no. 2 (February 8, 2018):  12 (12-14).