Middleboro Review and so on

Sunday Pages: The Bible as Required Reading in the Lone Star State The Texas Board of Education decided to make Bible passages part of the state's English literature curriculum. The subsequent outrage was misplaced. This shouldn't be controversial. Greg Olear Jun 28 Dear Reader, In January of 1991, Sting released The Soul Cages , his third (and best) studio album, inspired by the death of his father. The first single, “All This Time,” a song about his father’s funeral—and, more broadly, how we cope with death—features the line “ Better to be poor than be a fat man in the eye of a needle.” I was a senior in high school in 1991. I remember talking about the song that spring with my honors-class “frenemy,” whom we’ll call Dennis. He was going on about how dumb the lyrics were, because “fat man in the eye of a needle” struck him as silly and meaningless. “It’s from the Bible,” I told him, explaining the meaning of the allusion, and that it was a camel, not a fat man, that could no...