I have a few days where I do not even have to leave the house (well, the neighborhood, in a car). So I am reading: my email (which is a treasure trove), Dante's Inferno (for a podcast on Friday), books on Appalachia for a novel, NT Wright on the first century world and its connection to the church, and some fiction. From an essay in Christianity Today on tourism and pilgrimage:
But whether our destination is a martyr’s grave or a crystalline pool, the pilgrimage mindset is a fallacy. Tulum isn’t holier than Toledo. Paris, Texas, is just as filled with God’s grandeur as Paris, France. Jerusalem is made out of the same stuff as New Jersey. Because the Holy Spirit indwells Christians, we don’t need to go anywhere to better experience God.
I am going to Greece in November, God willing. But that may be my last such trip. I doubt I will ever get to the "Holy Land." That would be nice, but by the time Israel is safe again I may be too feeble to maneuver that terrain. I visited Turkey last fall and it was a fabulous trip, but I do not rave or present myself as more blessed or worse, more virtuous, because I was able to see Ephesus (more below) and the Haggia Sophia. I thank God for it, have great memories, and leave it at that.
I see God's hand, His work, His power, here in North Georgia.
All that said, Biblical Archaeology had a neat article about the hillside homes in Ephesus, which are quite remarkable, if for no other reason than we can be pretty sure Paul and John and Timothy visited them. This article discusses the artwork's pagan origins in the city that became a Christian hub. From the article:
The riot at Ephesus (Acts 19:12–41) and Paul’s exhortation for believers to turn “away from statues to the living God” (1 Thessalonians 1:9, Thomas’s translation) become more concrete with the archaeological finds from Ephesus in view. From Paul’s perspective, the diverse images found throughout homes could all be classified as “statues” or “idols” from which believers should turn away. For the families who inhabited these apartments, however, those same objects likely carried multiple meanings. A centuries-old relief may have functioned as a focus of religious devotion, but it could also have been an inherited heirloom, a memorial to an ancestor, a symbol of cultural identity, or simply part of what made that house feel like a home. Conversion, therefore, involved more than adopting new beliefs; it required renegotiating the objects inside the house. Removing an image meant more than rejecting an outside deity; it could also mean disrupting generations of family memory and domestic practice.
By recovering the everyday domestic context in which early Christians may have lived, the archaeology of Ephesus reveals conversion not as a movement from one neatly bounded religion to another, but as a complex renegotiation of the objects, spaces, and practices that shaped everyday life. Thomas’s article ultimately reminds us that the categories we use—Christian versus pagan, sacred versus ordinary—can obscure the realities of lived religion. The homes of Paul’s converts were not empty stages that Christianity filled; they were places already full of tradition and identity. Religion was entangled with acts everyday life—as ordinary as walking through your front door.
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