Skewed Conservative Christian Priorities

Bob Cargill created and shared this checklist: I think Bob is right about some things and sort of wrong about some things. I think he is right when he says that the skewed prioritization has to change, and that there is reason to be hopeful that it is indeed changing. I think he is sort [...]

Review of Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood

I’m grateful to Rachel Held Evans for having sent me an advance review copy of her book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband “Master”. I confess I am a bit embarrassed that I’m only blogging about it after the [...]

The Future Format of Books?

Tim Bulkeley has written a book. The title is Not Only a Father: Talk of God as Mother in the Bible and Christian Tradition. You can buy it in traditional printed book format if you are so inclined. But he has also done some other interesting and perhaps radically innovative things with it. He’s made [...]

Bible-Related Nonsense

I focus on information literacy skills in my course on the Bible – i.e. the ability to identify and utilize reliable sources of information amid the wide array of sources of varying degrees of reliability – and ridiculousness – that abound on the internet. And so I asked them at the end of class last [...]

How to Make a Liberal Bible Scholar

Today’s “Quote of the Day” comes from Greg Carey: The best way for conservative churches to produce “liberal” biblical scholars is to keep encouraging young people to read the Bible…Reading the Bible is a terrific cure for fundamentalism. That’s exactly how many of us so-called liberal Bible scholars got our start. Those quotes are from [...]

17 Minutes and 36 Seconds of Living Biblically

Here’s a link to A. J. Jacobs giving a TED talk which lasts for roughly 17 minutes, talking about his projects, focusing in particular on his book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible  (HT Nijay Gupta)

Cut-and-Paste Bible

Several people shared the above spoof advertisement on Facebook. I know that some conservative Christians will view the above as a jibe at liberals, whom they accuse of picking and choosing. But in my experience, liberals like myself are at least aware of what is in the Bible, warts and all, and for that very [...]