The recent case of Britanny Maynard and her move to Oregon in order to commit physician assisted (or at least physician plus drugs assisted) suicide, has reopened the debate about what we should think about suicide in general, and doctors willing to violate their Hippocratic oath to assist others in committing suicide. I am not here concerned with the debate in the larger culture, but rather would want to talk about whether Christians should, under any circumstances, be in favor… Read more

Near St. Martins, and also in the Vysehrad district of Prague is the cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul. It dates to the 11th century, but what you see now is mostly 19th century. It is one of the more beautiful churches in Prague, as you will now see, Notice the stained glass window with the picture of the sudarium cloth, the cloth with the image of the bloody head of Jesus thought to be the facial cloth found… Read more

While most Christians are familiar with the Protestant Reformation vis a vis what happened in Germany, Switzerland, and England, they are largely unaware of Jan Hus, and the reformation he undertook in highly Catholic eastern Europe. So first the statue, and then the history. Here is the memorial to Jan Hus who was executed for heresy July 6th 1415. Hus, as you will see, was educated in Prague, and was very much taken with the writings and views of Wycliffe,… Read more

Like many eastern European cities, there was a large Jewish population in the city prior to the Holocaust in WWII, and the sending off of millions to the concentration camps, of which there were two in Czechoslavakia. What you see in Praha then are old synagogues, mostly museums these days, though there is still some Jewish presence in this city. Here are pictures of three such famous synagogues in Praha. Clearly from the size and design of these synagogues, the… Read more

Perhaps you will remember Hippocrates (not to be confused with hypocrites), one of the fathers of medicine. Hippocrate’s motto was ‘do no harm’ and so promote health and well-being. There are not too many, indeed, I can hardly remember any super hero movies where violence, destruction, and death are NOT bathed in the rhetoric about glory, about self-sacrifice, indeed about a certain sort of heroism. This movie, Big Hero Six, is of a decidedly different ilk. It’s real hero is… Read more

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8hxFE7RpSg Read more

I’m hoping that it will not come as a great shock to you that there are two sides to the Vtlava/Moldau river, and in Praha one side has more of the old city…see above and one side has more of the new city…. So to get around in this very large city of 1.25 million people, we took the usual trams… Walking tours are grand, but man cannot live on touring alone, so we stopped for a nice lunch in… Read more

I have taped a full course on Johannine literature (the Gospel the Epistles, the Revelation). The course is listed as NT221, and here is a link to it. I bring this up now, because the pre-order price is much cheaper than when it goes live on Nov. 14th, so this is your window of opportunity to get it not only while it is hot, but before it becomes more expensive…… Here’s the info…. The product page is here: https://www.logos.com/product/42481/mobile-ed-nt221-the-wisdom-of-john-a-socio-rhetorical-commentary-on-johannine-literature. The… Read more

The proper transliterated name of the city is Praha, but Westerners have called it Prague forever, and so we will call it both. After the SBL conference in Vienna (which we shall get back to in due course) at the beginning of July, we took the train to Praha, about four hours by slow train from Vienna (which is actually Wien as in Wiener Schnitzel and Wieners (hot dogs etc.). As in Vienna, we had an Asbury graduate, Jennifer Alexander,… Read more

The thing about a good quality museum is that you can linger and appreciate it all, without the ‘glazed over’ effect of being in a huge museum where you simply can’t take it all in, and as a result you race from one room to the next looking for key items. This is not an issue at the Albertina. Impressionism was for the most part killed off by the First World War, and what replaced it was Cubism and Abstract… Read more