The Stories of the Brothers Grimm The brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collected their well-known stories from the oral tradition of the Germanic people. Their work went through many revisions before becoming the text we know today as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. When the brothers lived, their books were quite popular. Their compatriots bought almost as many of them as they did the Bible. Like the Bible, some of the stories are violent and crude, containing antisemitism and assumptions about gender roles and social stratification that we, in twenty-first-century America, may find offensive. This is true of folklore around the world. The oral history of a culture does not shrink from…
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Our Plans and God’s Laughter
The Ultimate Joke As others before me have said, death is the ultimate joke. [1] At birth, and for years afterward, we imagine we have eternity to walk, sing, and build towers of metal or of ideas. We scurry through our lives, hoping to make a difference to at least one person, to touch and be touched. We have dreams, and some of us manage to fulfill them. Yet even fulfilled dreams are not the end. Indeed, death’s absurdity may be hardest for those who complete what they set out to accomplish, for when they reach their destination, there’s nothing left. To keep going, one must find a new goal.…