Since school is about to commence, this meditation of methodology seemed timely! (Please note this is a copyrighted image. One is allowed to share this on Facebook, email it, or print it, but not use it without attribution to the website creator at www.phdcomics.com). Read more

Dr. Jerry Pattengale kindly asked me to give a lecture this summer at “the Passages living-history attraction in Colorado Springs. The lecture was on ‘Did the Canon Misfire?’ (on which see my books The Living Word of God, What’s in a Word, and the Gospel Code). While there, I got to spend a little time at the beautiful Garden of the Gods club overlooking the formations of the same name. Here are some shots of the scene, and also of... Read more

EXCLUSIVE By MATTHEW KALMAN “JERUSALEM, August 1 – In a stunning about-turn, after losing a 10-year legal effort to prove that an Israeli antiquities collector faked an inscription from Solomon’s Temple, Israel’s deputy state attorney begged the high court in Jerusalem on Wednesday to allow the Israeli government to keep the artifact on the grounds that it is “an antiquity.” Oded Golan, the Israeli antiquities collector who was acquitted of forging the Jehoash Tablet after a seven-year criminal trial, said... Read more

There was a nice piece by Rachel Held Evans on the CNN ‘faith’ page recently. Here is some of what she said. I think she’s essentially right about all this. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/27/why-millennials-are-leaving-the-church/?hpt=hp_c3 “I point to research that shows young evangelicals often feel they have to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith, between science and Christianity, between compassion and holiness. I talk about how the evangelical obsession with sex can make Christian living seem like little more than sticking to... Read more

Personal ethical issues like abortion are complex issues. They ought not to be decided by cliches or self-justifying dictums of various sorts, just in case the life of someone in somebody’s womb just happens to be a human being, and not merely a fetus. Let’s talk the pie chart above for a moment. What it shows is that in America at least, very few instances of abortion are cases where the mother of the child’s life is actually in danger... Read more

This an excerpt of an important forty page article in the Dictionary of Christian Biography ed. by William Smith et al. It gives you a sense of how Lightfoot critically assessed the work of ‘the father of church history’— Eusebius of Caesarea. Chiefly he faults him for lack of knowledge of Latin and important Latin Fathers such as Tertullian. Here is a bit of what he says (thanks to the site www.tertullian.org/rpearse/eusebius/lightfoot.htm‎l): “It will have appeared from this account that... Read more

These pictures were taken during the many years we lived in Ashland Ohio, which in most ways were great years. You can see from the pictures Christy’s joie d’vivre. She loved life, and she was a good big sister to David. The last picture is of her with Pastor Mitchell when she was confirmed after two years of catechism. Today, August 14th, would have been Christy’s 34th birthday. It is very hard to accept she is gone. But I am... Read more

Las Vegas of course, with a motto like ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’ has the reputation of being America’s version of ‘sin city’. But what if someone used a more comprehensive index of what counts as sin, say the seven deadly sins, and looked at the 100 top population areas in America using that index. Just for review, in case you’ve been napping, the seven deadly sins are envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth, and wrath (violence falling... Read more

“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life”– Picasso Whether we know it or not, and whether we like it or not, we swim in a cultural soup, a consumer cultural soup. One of the strength’s of Steve Turner’s book ‘Popcultured’ is in demonstrating just how pervasive the effect of pop culture is on everything from our values to the way we dress, what we listen to and watch, and what we eat. One of the main... Read more