Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Tagged again...

Tagged again, this time by Jana over at Pilgrimsteps.

Same rules as before. Go to page 123 of the book closest to you; find the first five sentences, then quote the next three sentences. Tag five people.

This is from Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric, by Stephen D. O’Leary which looks at apocalyptic thought in the history of the United States. The relevant passage is part of a long quotation from a 1842 editorial calling into question the predictions of imminent apocalypse by William Miller, a Baptist minister who predicted that the Second Coming would occur in 1843 and then in 1844:

“It therefore follows that the coldness of the clergy and church is one of the signs of that day. We also learn that all the signs which were to mark the approach of that day, the fulfillment of prophecies and the termination of prophetic periods, will be so little different from those which have been in days previous, that they will not catch the attention of any but those who are with humble prayer looking for the approach of that day….If then the church and world were all expecting the second advent of Christ immediately, we should know that that event would not now come, because the world would not be in the condition that we are assured it will be when Christ comes.”


I’m still reading about apocalypse and conspiracy as research for some writing I’m doing, so it might look like I read a lot of very heavy, very serious things a lot of the time. And it is true that I sometimes do.

On the other hand, just to prove that I’m not only about serious scholarly reading, my relaxation reading currently is a YA novel, Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer. It’s a vampire novel in which a seventeen-year-old girl moves to Washington state to live with her father and falls in love with the seventeen-year-old vampire who sits next to her in her biology class. Of course, as he says at one point, he’s been seventeen for awhile. If I was using that book for this meme (as I could have, as it was only slightly farther away from the O’Leary book when I wrote this), the relevant passage would have been:

“That’s Sam - he’s nineteen,” he informed me.
“What was that he was saying about the doctor’s family?” I asked innocently.
“The Cullens? Oh, they’re not supposed to come onto the reservation.”

Well, that’s actually four sentences, I guess, but close enough.

Twilight is a good book, by the way. It might be classified as a YA novel, but it’s keeping this definitely-older-than-YA reader turning the pages. I stayed up reading much later than I should have last night because I just couldn’t put it down.

Oh, yeah. If you're reading this, consider yourself tagged.

1 comment:

jana said...

thanks for playing along!! :)

and I stayed up late several nights reading Twilight, too :)