Robert J. Hutchinson is a full-time writer who studied Hebrew while living in Israel and who holds a graduate degree in New Testament. He describes himself as an open minded though believing Christian. Here are some extracts from Robert J. Hutchinson, Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth — and How They Confirm the Gospel Accounts (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2015): [I]n the past few years I’ve been amazed to discover that leading experts... Read more
I continue with notes to myself from John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007): The Qur’an repeatedly teaches that both disbelief and variety in religious opinions exist with the permission of God or even by his will, and that, accordingly, no Muslim is obligated to eliminate such disagreements by coercion on his behalf. Consider, for example, these passages: If it had been God’s... Read more
Despite our very considerable differences (which is putting them mildly), I was saddened to learn just now of the death of M. Gerald Bradford, the former director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship who initiated and presided over its dramatic change of direction in 2012 and led it thereafter until 2015. Jerry had been in very poor health and evidently suffered a fall down the stairs at home. *** Among the very most... Read more
In 1878, David Whitmer was living with his family at 213 East Main Street in Richmond, Missouri, in a two-story, seven-room house that had been built in 1843. David was a respected citizen of the town, having served as its elected mayor in 1867 and 1868. Nearly fifty years before, in 1829, he had become one the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon. For the past roughly four decades, though, he had been completely estranged from the... Read more
I share a few notes to myself from John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007), 17-19: Jihad is not associated or equated with the words “holy war” anywhere in the Quran. (17) The earliest Qur’anic verses dealing a right to defend oneself, with “defensive jihad,” came shortly after the forced hijra or emigration of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in... Read more
I think that I’ll continue just a bit more with the theme of mind-boggling vastness and wonder that I addressed on Sunday, taking a couple of notes from David Wilkinson, God, Time and Stephen Hawking: An Exploration into Origins (London and Grand Rapids: Monarch Books, 2001): Galaxies themselves group together in many ways. We are part of some 34 other galaxies which make up the Local Group which is a few million light years across, and this Local... Read more
New, on the website of the Interpreter Foundation: In God’s Image and Likeness 2: Enoch, Noah, and the Tower of Babel: Genesis 10: The Generation of the Sons of Noah Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in In God’s Image and Likeness 2: Enoch, Noah, and the Tower of Babel (2014) by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw and David J. Larsen. Abstract: This chapter on Genesis 10 demonstrates that it is more than account of a... Read more
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reading gradually through Darwinism and the Divine: Evolutionary Thought and Natural Theology (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), by the appallingly prolific Anglo-Irish theologian Alister McGrath, who holds Oxford doctorates in both divinity and intellectual history — which he earned after he had first received an Oxford doctorate in molecular biophysics. Darwinism and the Divine emerged from the 2009 Hulsean Lectures, which he delivered by invitation at the University of Cambridge. From time to time, I will share... Read more
I continue with my notes toward a brief introductory discussion of the great early Muslim mystic Rābiʿa al-‘Adawiyya al-Qaysiyya. I draw first upon the discussion of her that is given by the late British scholar Margaret Smith (1886-1970) in Muslim Women Mystics: The Life and Work of Rābiʿa and Other Women Mystics in Islam (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001). Here are a handful of my notes; taken in this case from pages 22-26: Unfortunately, the earliest real source for Rābiʿa’s biography to... Read more
In his classic 1952 book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis discusses God and the moral law. He notes that, when people are quarreling, they often say things like these: How would you like it if somebody did that to you? That’s my seat. I was there first! Leave him alone. He’s not doing you any harm. Give me some of your brownie. I gave you some of my fries. Come on! You promised! In all of... Read more
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