Not Gray Yet!

Eduardo, for his birthday, quoted a bit of Edward FitzGerald's Rubaiyatt of Omar Khayyam, and I thought that seemed as appropriate as any poem to quote from for a birthday (especially since I just read through the whole thing last week and dissected it this week), so I shall do the same for mine:

With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow,
And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow;
And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd—
“I came like Water, and like Wind I go.”

Into this Universe, and Why not knowing
Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing;
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste,
I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing.

Yes, it is my birthday today (well, actually, my birthday ended 56 minutes ago in my time zone). It has been a quiet, but very nice day. I spent most of the day with my mother (my dad has a cold, so he is going to celebrate with me later this week). It was exactly the kind of peaceful day that I wanted.

I was given several nice gifts. A friend and professor of mine gave me the Great Passion by Eberhard Busch, an expert on Barthian theology and Karl Barth's last personal assistant, as a birthday present. This is the professor who introduced me to Barth a while back. The book looks like it works through the major theology of Barth with a well written narration and a substantial helping of quotes from Dogmatics and other writings of Barth. At any rate, I started reading that today, which was fun.

My mother gave me a nice, compact, leather covered New Century Version Bible, which seems really nice. I'm not familiar with the NCV, but in comparing it against the NIV, and out of memory, with the KJV, NLT and NRSV, it seems to do a good job of saying the same things in a way that is more like modern English idiom (just a cursory survey). It strikes me that it did not seem dumbed down as much as the NLT and CEV sometimes strike me as doing (not to pick on those translations, I like them, but sometimes they seem that they targeted too simple of vocabulary).

As a side note: I've been trying to give the ESV a bit of a try, but I find I'm lazy and keep returning to my NIV as my primary study Bible. However, since my One Year Bible is in the NLT, that is probably what I read the most. I like the NLT better than the CEV, but both seem overly simplified to me at times. For my Old Testament course, we are using a version of the NRSV with extensive notes from the Society for Biblical Literature, and I must say I rather like it as well, although it isn't as pleasant as the others for light reading. However, I suspect that it could very well become one of my favorites by the time I get done with the course. We'll see how this new NCV shakes out, but perhaps it will edge out my pocket-sized NIV, which is starting to get kind of worn (especially since an open package of Lifesavers candies accidentally got pressed against the pages)…