A book I’ve been looking forward to reading arrived in the mail today. It is by Judy Klitsner, and the title is Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2009). It relates to the diversity of Scripture, intertextuality and a number of other topics that interest me. Once I’ve had a chance to read it, I’ll review it here. For the moment, I simply wanted to mention that the... Read more

Greg Laden, the well-known science blogger, mentioned in a post today a stipulation of the Bloggers’ Code that I must confess I was unaware of. He wrote, “it is against the blogger’s code to live blog someone else while they are unconscious.” I was unaware of this, but I assume that it has implications for those who might be planning to live blog the upcoming Society of Biblical Literature conference. Unconsciousness has been known to occur, whether during papers or... Read more

Kevin Scull has posted the latest Biblical Studies Carnival. Lots of great stuff, well worth the wait! Read more

The title of this post is an intentional pun, since it could be a reference to the bananas belonging to Ray Comfort or to the fact that he is bananas. Both are relevant, since he is famous for introducing the laughable “banana argument” into the discourse of apologetics. More recently, he helpfully illustrated that scientific evidence, even scientific evidence from the last century, is simply too dangerous and too harmful to young-earth creationist pseudoscience for it to be safe to... Read more

The title of this post is an intentional pun, since it could be a reference to the bananas belonging to Ray Comfort or to the fact that he is bananas. Both are relevant, since he is famous for introducing the laughable “banana argument” into the discourse of apologetics. More recently, he helpfully illustrated that scientific evidence, even scientific evidence from the last century, is simply too dangerous and too harmful to young-earth creationist pseudoscience for it to be safe to... Read more

The latest issue of the journal Interpretation, 63.4 (Oct 2009), includes a review of my book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith (on p.426). If your library has a subscription to either the Gale Group database or Highbeam, you can probably read the review already. If not, you may have to wait until it makes it into other databases or until the print copy gets processed and appears on the shelf. Read more

The Digital Commons at Butler University obtained permission to share an excerpt from my recent book The Only True God: Early Christian Monotheism in Its Jewish Context. It is chapter 5, which is on worship, Christology and monotheism in the Book of Revelation. Read more

It is high time to resume my blogging through John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One. I particularly valued chapter 16, which begins by emphasizing that questions about purpose and process are different sorts of questions, and that we simply do not have enough information to enable us to claim that some specific scientific model of the cosmos is or is not reconcilable with the nature of God (p.134). Walton also warns that “biblical belief does not associate God’s... Read more

I thought that the videos of people playing the solo from the Genesis song “In The Cage” were helpful when I was trying to learn that solo, but look what someone else did: a tutorial that tells the names of the left hand chords and shows the right hand part note by note as you listen to it in a slowed down version. I appreciate this both as someone who plays and is a Genesis fan, and also as an... Read more

I increasingly turn to YouTube for a bit of music during lunch, and today I happened across this impressive medley of keyboard solos in a progressive rock idiom. Enjoy! Read more