At the recommendation of several of my students, I watched the Family Guy – Blue Harvest, the Family Guy Star Wars parody episode. Although there was a fair bit of rude humor and other aspects that are not for the faint hearted, some of it was so well done as to deserve a recommendation. Among [...]

Scholars of both the Bible and Rabbinic literature will be familiar with discussions of the Eighteen Benedictions (Shemoneh Esreh) and the debates about the history and original form of the “birkat ha-minim”, the “blessing (i.e. cursing) of the heretics”. Many New Testament scholars have intersected with this subject as it has been discussed in connection [...]

“Intelligent Design is pure science” has been the claim of the movement associated with this name from the outset. And now you can read about it in a brand new book that explains what Intelligent Design is. The foreword to the book is written by a well-known conservative Christian apologist (and one of the authors [...]

I just watched the latest episode of Doctor Who, “The Stolen Earth” [SPOILER WARNING for American viewers]. Fan sites are abuzz with speculation about what is going on, since David Tennant is supposed to be back as the Doctor in subsequent episodes. But Davros had been monitoring earth and watching LOST – that’s where he [...]

Many people are (or ought to be) interested in learning the language Jesus spoke as his native tongue, and in which his words were first uttered: Aramaic. It is also the language in which a few parts of the Bible were written, as well as the Talmud, Targums (paraphrases of the Jewish Scriptures), and other [...]

“Believers, Jews, Christians and Sabaeans—all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do what is right—shall be rewarded by their Lord; they shall have nothing to fear or to regret” (Qur’an 2:62). I post this in particular because of a discussion on another blog where someone spoke from their assumption that all [...]

In my class on Paul and the Early Church, we worked through several of Paul’s letters, including Romans. As I worked through this famous epistle once again, it seemed to me that the most popular passages for quotation from the letter are not the parts most central to Paul’s argument. Could it be that those [...]