There are things your minister, pastor, priest or preacher would love to be able to tell you, but cannot because of concerns about job security. I am not only thinking about the scandalous revelations that occasionally come to light, nor even the relatively minor fact that your pastor sometimes comes to the pulpit the same [...]

This is just a quick entry to share a couple of useful sites I’ve learned about recently (one about a month or two ago, the other yesterday). The first is the site of a program called Scratch which one can download freely from the MIT web site. It allows one to make one’s own animation [...]

This entry is simply to share another interesting connection between Biblical literature and popular culture, in this instance Micah Kiel’s article on the Society of Biblical Literature web site entitled “Did Paul Get Whacked? The Endings of The Sopranos and the Acts of the Apostles“. The question asked there regarding what constitutes a ‘good ending’ [...]

Many thanks to Jim West for bringing recent news about liberation theology to our attention. What I find most troubling about most of the discussions of religion and economics is that we find ourselves choosing ‘the lesser of two evils’, as though our only options are Capitalism and Communism in a more or less pure [...]

The title may sound like a joke, but the truth is that most recent discussions of oral tradition in the Gospels have made use of the Lord-Parry school’s work on folk songs and epics. I have some significant problems with this, given the role of meter and rhyme and the assistance to memory provided by [...]

A news item mentioned on the Christianity Today blog (which itself interacts with and quotes Jim West’s blog) as well as in newspapers highlights a Babylonian tablet that correlates with information in Jeremiah. This is a fascinating discovery, and very interesting for historians. From a historian’s perspective, this just shows that the Bible at times [...]

Origen famously created controversy in his day by merely speculating on the possibility that even the devil could be saved. It is important to ask why this idea should be controversial in a Christian context. Allegedly, Christianity is all about redemption, about the possibility of those living in darkness seeing the light and changing direction. [...]