There has been quite a bit of speculation about why Donald Trump keeps talking about acquiring Greenland and Canada becoming the 51st state. Most are just baffled. I think I can offer an explanation. There is a consistency among several of his policies and pursuits that suggests a tactic, a strategy, that I think deserves to be talked about more. At the intersection of my interest in religion and my love of science fiction falls my interest in dystopian fiction.... Read more
I received an email today from someone who is losing their faith…in the Bible. They saw me in a YouTube video and was motivated to write because it was clear that I do not believe the Bible is unquestionable divine truth, yet I am a Christian. Since they have been losing their faith in the Bible, they were hoping I might have something helpful to share. Here is what I wrote (edited for clarity for a general readership that did... Read more
That someone who looks more and more like the caricature of the antichrist every day would launch an attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion is not surprising. That’s what antichrists are supposed to do. However, I have seen more and more conservative Christians not merely falling in line behind him but repeating his lies. As an example, take T. Michael W. Halcomb’s recent Substack piece. He claims that what diversity, equity, and inclusion mean for Christians and for everyone else... Read more
At a recent gathering of local New Testament scholars here in Indianapolis, the question of whether the Gospel of John’s Christology might be adoptionist came up. In my own work on the Gospel of John, I looked closely at the few and often neglected academic studies of this topic, and found myself persuaded that the Gospel of John can be plausibly interpreted in this way. My very first academic publication, in Princeton’s journal of graduate research Koinonia Journal, addressed this... Read more
Some people immediately associate artificial intelligence and plagiarism, going so far as to call LLM chatbots “plagiarism machines.” I have pushed back on that in the past, but some new evidence has me rethinking this. Artifically Intelligently Designed Let’s assume you are an educator, and students are supposed to explain what Intelligent Design is. If you got these two answers, would you consider them too similar to be coincidental? Conceptual Foundations of Intelligent Design Intelligent Design is defined by... Read more
I will start with a call for papers for the American Academy of Religion’s Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity program unit and the Society of Biblical Literature’s John the Baptist program unit, but even if those do not interest you, please keep reading because I end with something important and urgent, Butler University’s Day of Giving! First, the American Academy of Religion just announced “We are extending the deadline for the CFP until Monday, March 10 at 11:59pm ET.” Here... Read more
There’s a story behind how we ended up hosting a public lecture at Butler University on “Religious Experience and Psychedelics” and this is it. I was interviewed by Butler University’s student newspaper, The Butler Collegian, about this upcoming public lecture and thought it might be of interest for me to include the entirety of what I provided to the journalist. Each year Butler University has this Series on Religion and Society which brings four speakers to campus to share their expertise... Read more
Led To Severance By Jesus I did not expect the latest episode of Severance to feature a character saying that he had been led to severance by Jesus. I have been watching Severance avidly since it first aired. Such an interesting concept, not unlike that explored by Daniel Dennett in his short story philosophical thought experiment “Where Am I?” I’m teaching a course on religion and the mind, and so the show also connects somewhat with that. There had been... Read more
Someone asked the question on Reddit of whether the New Testament Gospels were anonymous. Here is the answer I provided. My own view is that they were anonymous in the same way that most ancient works were originally and in most copies. In Judaism the biblical texts were known by their first words and not separate titles. In antiquity in general authorship circulated as paratextual information rather than as something written within the text. The custom of listing the author... Read more
I read an article that sounded like more of the hype that has surrounded AI from the outset, claiming that AGI is just around the corner. AGI, as a reminder, stands for Artificial General Intelligence. It claimed that AI was already demonstrating superior skill to humans on certain metrics. Skeptical, I looked for details, and one of them was genuinely striking. It involves an LLM solving riddles, which would indeed seem to involve reasoning. If you have read my past... Read more
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