The Kathleen Browning Miniatures Museum involves a truly remarkable, indeed jaw-dropping collection of 1 to 12 scale miniatures of all sorts of houses, rooms, churches, Hobbiton, cloth shops, pubs and much more.  It will not be possible to cover all of this in one or two posts, as the holdings are vast. Suffice it to say, it is certainly worth the trip to Maysville to see this unbelievable human craftsmanship in miniature. Technically, the museum is called the Kentucky Gateway... Read more

Maysville is a quaint old river town on the Kentucky side of the Ohio river. It is a town of about 8,800 people today, but it has been around for about 300 years and has many interesting features, including a world-class miniatures museum which we will talk about in subsequent posts.  Here I just want to give you a sense of the visual aspect of the town itself.  First of all the impression you should get is of a well-preserved... Read more

One of the subjects not really discussed in this book, except tangentially, is the role of the police in our society, whose motto is ‘to serve and protect’ which frankly is something we all need in a violent society like America’s.  At the same time, there is need for police reform in various places, which includes better training, and actions based on better information. For example, there shouldn’t be any ‘shoot first and ask questions later’ attitudes, nor should there... Read more

One of the more stunning statistics found in this book has to do with religious affiliation and gun ownership. Protestants constitute the highest percentage of gun owners with white evangelicals leading the way, considerably more than Catholics, Jews, or even non-religious individuals.  So much for living by the Sermon on the Mount. And what stunned me even more is this is so even though there are whole Protestant groups such as the Amish, the old order Mennonites and various Quakers... Read more

The essay by Prof. Shelly Matthews is engaging, not least because upfront she admits she’s going to do a feminist reading of our presenting issue, grounded in the earlier work of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza.  As engaging as the essay is it has various sorts of hermeneutical problems, not the least of which is the assertion that the NT contradicts itself on the issue of violence. This is simply false and involves a superficial reading of the NT evidence.  For example,... Read more

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All too often, in our overly sexualized culture, when teenagers declare they are in love, what they really mean is the hormones are raging and they are in heat. At first, this retro movie set in the 70s during the gas shortage in Hollywood, seems to be just another story like that.  But in fact it is not just a story about sexual frisson. For one thing, the girl is in her mid to late 20s, and the boy is... Read more

  In this post we are dealing with the chapter by Prof. T.M. Lemnos, yet another OT professor (of which there is a plurality in this study, with NT scholars under-represented) whose concern is about the interface between weapon and hunting images combined with sexual imagery in the OT.  The chapter is entitled “Israelite Bows and American Guns”.  She is right that the representation of these things involves a variety of mingled together factors, and hyper-masculinity comes into the picture... Read more

One of the more shocking moments I had in the past few years was when I was invited to speak at a major evangelical university in Virginia and was in the student union and there were sign up tables there— right next to the ‘sign up for a short term mission to share the love of Jesus’ table, was a table signing students up to be members of the NRA. Which of these things is not like the other?  But... Read more

https://youtu.be/PFc31CKahbw Read more