The ax man cometh…. and no one can sleep. Don’t fear the riffer…. fear the shredder:) Read more
The ax man cometh…. and no one can sleep. Don’t fear the riffer…. fear the shredder:) Read more
One thing we know for sure about Edinburgh resident J.K. Rowling— she knows how to right long novels which keep people’s attention right to the end. This is no small feat in the age of short attention spans, and twittering and tweating. If you mention 140 characters to Rowling she’d laugh and say— “yes that’s how many interesting characters had roles in my last novel”. The Cormoran Strike series of detective fiction is now in its third installment, entitled ‘Career... Read more
So I’m flying back from Bellingham Wash. where I was doing some filming, and lo and behold, I’m sitting next to a fellow older Christian and minister named Mark Frontczak. Turns out he is also a Christian cartoonist who told me— ‘grab what you need from my site’ and so I told him I’d take him up on that one since I’m always looking for blog-worthy material. We talked about the off beat humor in one of our favorite cartoonists—... Read more
BEN: You go on to compare and contrast the Stoic ethics of a Musonius Rufus with that we find in Paul and elsewhere in the NT, and you make the valid point, I think, that the Stoic teacher is offering a sort of ethic for ascetical athletes that are his understudies, not for everyone, whereas the ethic of Paul is a community ethic. But isn’t the early Jewish ethic of say Philo also a community wide ethic? How different is... Read more
BEN: In your discussion in the last full chapter of the book, talking about the differences in behavior between Christians and non-Christians, I notice that you do not discuss the pacifism of the early Christians, namely their refusal to serve in the Roman military, or any army for that matter, based on a certain reading of Jesus’ teachings. That surely would have been a distinctive practice. I agree that this practice was probably in part based on the concern about... Read more
BEN: The more I think about what is truly distinctive about earliest Christianity, which helps explain all the other things you are pointing to, including the bookishness of the group, it is that these early Christians were on a mission to redeem the world, both Jew and Gentile. They believed the world was lost, and they believed they had been commissioned to evangelize the whole known world, starting from Jerusalem. While other features of early Christianity are distinctive, but not... Read more
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