Zenas, "a person 'skilled in the Law par excellence, the Torah, even the whole OT'"

     Reidar Hvalvik, "Named Jewish believers connected with the Pauline mission," in Jewish believers in Jesus:  the early centuries, ed. Oskar Skarsaune and Reidar Hvalvik (Peabody, MA:  Hendrickson Publishers, Inc., 2007), 176-177 (154-178).  Most strikingly, "Admittedly Zenas is a contraction of Zenodorus, 'gift of Zeus,' and it is argued that it is 'unlikely' that a Jewish lawyer would have such a pagan name [('So I. Howard Marshall')].  This argument is, however, not valid.  There are several examples of Jews with typical pagan names, e.g., the female equivalent Zenodora ['Used of a Jewish woman in Rome (CIJ 43; cf. Noy, Jewish inscriptions, 100)'], further Dionysius, Apollonius, and Serapion."
     "The second name to be examined more closely is Lois, the grandmother of Timothy (2 Tim 1:5). . . .  Her name, Lois, is probably Cilician, but this does not help us very much in light of what we know of Jewish names.  There is, however, a 50 percent chance that Lois was a Jew.  The fact that she is juxtaposed with Timothy's Jewish mother increases the probability" (177).

• Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (Oxford).  Down when I last tried.

"the one-cell human embryo has, right then and there, radical capacities, to think, talk, and laugh, which a frog embryo simply lacks. And these radical capacities are the rational foundation of human equality."

law.nd.edu

"human beings always have radical ­capacities that animals of other kinds never have. It is a sober truth—more and more intelligible as our knowledge of genetic complexity and the nanophysics of DNA expands—that the one-cell human embryo has, right then and there, radical capacities, to think, talk, and laugh, which a frog embryo simply lacks. And these radical capacities are the rational foundation of human equality. Their possession by every member of our species, from conception until death, justifies communities in undertaking the burdens of envisaging and securing equal protection of law, and in setting out on the course of acknowledging rights of persons. . . .
". . . the fact of the matter is as stated frankly by Robert G. Edwards, the first person to bring a human person from conception in a Petri dish to birth from her mother’s womb. Work on in vitro fertilization, into which ethical considerations 'hardly entered,' enabled him, he wrote, to 'examine a microscopic human being—one in its very earliest stages of development.' At its one-, two- and four-cell stages, 'the embryo is passing through a critical period in its life of great exploration: it becomes magnificently organized, switching on its own biochemistry,' increasing 'in size, and preparing itself quickly for implantation in the womb.'
     "Acknowledging that a human being is sexed radically—that is, from its very beginning—Edwards said about his first 'test-tube baby,' Louise Brown, 'She was beautiful then [as one or two cells], and she is beautiful now.' That appreciation of beauty went beyond the facts of the matter, but knowingly presupposed a totally informed grasp of the facts of the matter: about the dynamic, self-directing unity and integrity of Louise’s being, at every stage from her beginning, and about her personal membership of humankind from that earliest time of her life.
     "The words of the profoundly secular Dr. Edwards, like the more highly articulated syntheses of developmental-biological information with philosophical precision such as one finds in Robert George and Christopher Tollefsen’s Embryo (2008), all reinforce the already inevitable conclusion: Justice Stevens was simply mistaken in claiming—as he repeatedly did, most elaborately in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services—that the question of when human life (or personhood) begins is theological and/or religious, a question that there can be no secular purpose in resolving.
"Difficult or easy, that question, like its answer, is in truth strictly factual. Not in the same sense as history is factual, but in the equally secular sense in which natural science and philosophical assessments of natural-scientific findings are factual. It is like the judgment that we are animals that can make free choices, in which nothing determines which of two or more options will be chosen other than the choosing itself; or the judgment that reasons for judgment are not reducible to very complex physical interactions and causalities; or the judgment that an original singularity ('Big Bang'), billions of years ago, better explains the data than alternative histories of the universe. One is making a strictly secular judgment when one concludes that not only the one-cell, but equally the two-cell and four-cell human embryo—and equally the embryo at all later stages (including in a special, complex way, the relatively rare cases of monozygotic twinning, and excluding the also relatively rare cases of hydatidiform moles and other products of human conception that lack the epigenetic primordia for development of human capacities)—exists, functions, and develops as a unified, self-directed whole of a particular (human!) kind and never as a mere collection of contiguous but unintegrated individual cells. Equally secular and equally available is the rational conclusion that each adult, child, infant, and unborn child had his or her personal beginning precisely as a one- and then two- and then four-celled embryo with just those radical capacities which, by their species-specific diversities, both distinguish him or her from every other human person and unite all these human persons, all of us, in basic equality of humanity.
     "Our understanding (and accurate critical assessment) of the amazing way in which species-specific information ('form') dominates the astounding storm of partially random nano-level molecular and sub-molecular events is knowledge that is, if anything, more a cause (or potential cause) of moving toward 'theological' or 'religious' hypotheses and judgments than it is a result or manifestation of theology or religion. Justice Stevens had things backward, and his Webster claim is no rational or constitutional barrier to revisiting and rejecting the Roe denial of personhood before birth."

     John Finnis, "Abortion is unconstitutional," First things no. 312 (April 2021):  37-38 (29-38).

Rerum, Deus, tenax vigor

Rerum, Deus, tenax vigor,
immotus in te permanens,
lucis diurnae tempora
successibus determinans,

largire clarum vespere, | largire lumen vespere,
quo vita nusquam decidat,
sed praemium mortis sacrae
perennis instet gloria.

Trans. J. M. Neale:

O God, creation's secret force,
yourself unmoved, all motion's source,
who from the morn till evening ray
through all its changes guide the day:

Grant us, when this short life is past,
the glorious evening that shall last;
that, by a holy death attained,
eternal glory may be gained.

Trans. Ellerton & Hort:

O Strength and Stay upholding all creation,
Who ever dost Thyself umoved abide,
Yet day by day the light in due gradation
From hour to hour through all its changes guide;

Grant to life’s day a calm unclouded ending,
An eve untouched by shadows of decay,
The brightness of a holy death-bed blending
With dawning glories of the Eternal Day.

     Usually attributed to St. Ambrose (Connelly, Hymns of the Roman liturgy no. 21), this does not appear in Ambroise de Milan:  hymnes, ed. Jacques Fontaine, Patrimoines Christianisme (Paris:  Cerf, 2008).  Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology:  "author unknown. This hymn is in the Ambrosian tradition, but is not thought to be by Ambrose himself."

in purpose and performance

"O God, strength of those who hope in you, graciously hear our pleas, and, since without you mortal frailty can do nothing, grant us always the help of your grace, that in following your commands we may please you by our resolve and our deeds.  Through."

"Deus, in te sperantium fortitudo, invocationibus nostris adesto propitius, et, quia sine te nihil potest mortalis infirmitas, gratiae tuae praesta semper auxilium, ut, in exsequendis mandatis tuis, et voluntate tibi et actione placeamus.  Per."

     Collect, Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, Missale Romanum.  =Corpus orationum no. 1245:

"Deus, in te sperantium fortitudo, adesto propitius invocationibus nostris et, quia sine te nihil potest mortalis infirmitas, praesta auxilium gratiae tuae, ut, in exsequendis mandatis tuis et voluntate tibi et actione placeamus.  Per."

This (which lacks the semper added to it after Vatican II) is present in the mid 8th century Old Gelasian (Rome, Vatic. Reg. Lat. 316, 88r; Mohlberg, Eizenhöfer, & Sifrin, eds. Liber sacramentorum Romanae Ecclesiae ordinis anni circuli (Rome, 1965) no. 566; Wilson, ed. (Oxford, 1894) no. 587), as well as a couple of other 8th-century sacramentaries (Gellon., Rhen.); and, although Corpus orationum doesn't mention this, in the Gregorian (Hadrianum), which was copied from an earlier Roman original in 811-812 (Deshusses, Le sacramentaire Grégorien (Fribourg, 1992) no. 1129 (vol. 1, 3rd. ed., p. 390; also nos. 595, 1964, etc.).

1979:  Book of common prayer, Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, Contemporary:  "O God, the strength of all those who put their trust in you:  Mercifully accept our prayers; and because in our weakness we can do nothing good without you, give us the help of your grace, that in keeping your commandments we may please you both in will and deed; through."

1979:  Book of common prayer, Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, Traditional:  "O God, the strength of all those who put their trust in thee:  Mercifully accept our prayers; and because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping thy commandments we may please thee both in will and deed; through."

1928:  The book of common prayer, First Sunday after Trinity:  "O God, the strength of all those who put their trust in thee; Mercifully accept our prayers; and because, through the weakness of our mortal nature, we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed; through."

1892:

1662:  The book of common-prayer, First Sunday after Trinity (as ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford, 2011)):  "O God, the strength of all them that put their trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping of thy commandments we may please thee, both in will and deed, through."

1549:  The booke of the common prayer, First Sunday after Trinity (Everyman First and second Prayer books of 1910):  "God, the strength of all theym that trust in thee, mercifully accept our prayers; and because the weakenes of oure mortall nature can do no good thyng without thee, graunt us the helpe of thy grace, that in kepyng of thy commaundementes we may please thee, both in will and dede; through."

"the modern view combining relativism and progress . . . is incoherent."

IVP

"the modern view combining relativism and progress as widely understood is incoherent.  A true relativism would assume that no worldview is better than another; a true progressivism would assume that worldviews are moving closer and closer to a predetermined and preferred goal.  The two beliefs are mutually exclusive.  The assumption of the superiority of 'our' views to that of older cultures is the most stubborn remaining variety of ethnocentrism."

     Jeffrey Burton Russell, Inventing the flat earth:  Columbus and modern historians (New York:  Praeger, 1991), 76.

Not even Zacharia Lilio

      Contra James J. Allegro, "What was in doubt at the end of the fifteenth century was not the spherical composition of the cosmos, as expounded by Sacrobosco and many others, but the way the two lowermost spheres, of earth and water, were positioned in relation to each other.  In the context of this debate, Zacharia Lilio was a traditionalist who upheld the two-sphere conception against recent attempts to reinstate Ptolemy’s notion of a combined sphere of earth and water, also known as the terraqueous globe.  His stance was still tenable in the year 1496 in so far as the exploratory voyages organized by European maritime powers had not yet brought back news of a large landmass in the 'opposite' part of the world.  The incipient exploration of the coastline of South America in the years 1498-1504, which is associated with names such as Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Pedro Alvarez Cabral, and Gonçalo Coelho, was about to change this.  Allegro is hence right that Lilio adhered to a conception of the earth’s physical configuration that was eventually proven wrong as a result of new empirical data. . . .  The nature of Lilio’s error, however is very different from what Allegro’s essay would have us believe.  [For 'Lilio here, as elsewhere, uses the term terra to denote the habitable landmass'.  He is discussing 'pars nostra terrarium' and not its 'universum circuitum', and for that reason cannot be enlisted in support of the claim that, as Allegro says, 'Europeans were not always united in their spherical earth beliefs'.]
     "James Allegro declined an invitation to respond."

     C. Philipp E. Nothaft, "Zaccaria Lilio and the shape of the earth: a brief response to Allegro’s 'Flat earth science,'" History of science 55, no. 4 (December 2017):  496-497, 496 (490–98), underscoring mine, and James J. Allegro, "The bottom of the universe:  flat earth science in the Age of Encounter," History of science 55, no. 1 (March 2017):  62 (61-85).  Cf. this earlier post, and this one, too.

Sloth as "the ultimate cause of 'work for work's sake'"

"At the zenith of the Middle Ages . . . it was held that sloth and restlessness, 'leisurelessness', the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of 'work for work's sake'. . . .  the restlessness at the bottom of a fanatical and suicidal activity . . . [was thought to] come from the lack of will to action".

     Josef Pieper, Leisure:  the basis of culture III, par. 1, trans. Alexander Dru ((San Francisco:  Ignatius Press, 2009 [1952]), 43).