I got a call from Joseph tonight about what he (and his classroom full of children) thought was an earthquake: Loud "BRRMMRMMRMMRMMMM"-type noise, shaking, about four seconds long, you know, earthquake. Turns out that it was mysterious "boom" of unknown origin. No plane crash, no missile attack, no seismic event...just a boom that shook the entire county. Weird. Maybe Dick Cheney has moved his undisclosed location to SD? Or it was somehow related to Barry Bonds (in town to play the Padres: rained out)? My guess is the airborne explosion of a largish meteor. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Plus, I was out of town at the time. In Oakland like a mug.
I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household
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