This item from the NCAA, about a major meeting recently held at Brigham Young University on the treatment of LGBTQIA athletes at conservative religious schools, will interest more than a few of you, I think: “Breaking Ground” *** One participant in the NCAA “Common Ground” meeting at BYU asked “How can we help redeem some of the deep hurt the church has caused our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters?” While there is no doubt that... Read more
A piece in the 13 December 2014 issue of the Economist reported on an article that had just been published in Science. It seems that a major research project had just recently sequenced the genomes of 48 different species of modern birds, showing that the Neoaves, the biological “clade” that contains 95% of modern bird species (though not chickens and ducks), “arose in a spectacular burst of evolution and diversification just a few million years after the asteroid strike”... Read more
During our recent visit to Egypt, I found out that — contrary to what I believe I had heard before — the tour that I’ll be accompanying to Egypt between 9 May and 16 May 2019 may still have some vacancies. The local guide who will lead us in May, Hany Tawfik, is a friend who was with us most recently in late December and early January. He is one of the finest, most enjoyable, and most... Read more
Some of you may have received a greater or lesser number of “notifications” from the Interpreter Foundation over the past day or two, including a few announcing the launch of new ventures including the term Mormon. I myself received a flood of them yesterday afternoon. Nearly thirty, in the space of ten minutes. As I examined them in puzzlement, I noticed that they all contained announcements dating to 2012. What happened is that some technical work was... Read more
It’s time to revisit my occasional commentary on the New Testament. I’ll take it slowly and in small snippets, and I plan to go through all four gospels and the book of Acts. I won’t be doing the gospels one by one, but, rather, in “harmony,” using as the basis for my divisions of material Kurt Aland, ed., Synopsis of the Four Gospels: Greek-English Edition of the Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum, 14th ed. (Stuttgart: German Bible Society, 2009). The... Read more
I’ve never previously read Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), including its translation of the remarkable twelfth-century Andalusian Arabic text that is at its heart. In fact, it’s been a fair amount of time since I last read Hayy ibn Yaqzan at all, and I’m noticing quite a few things in rereading it now that I hadn’t noticed before, or don’t recall having noticed. I’ll share... Read more
In connection with this holiday, today, honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy, here are a few quotations from his remarkably eloquent speeches and writings: “Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of... Read more
Current research in primatology and evolutionary biology may suggest at least a partial answer to the questions that I ask in the caption above. I share some notes on things that I found interesting in Lydia Denworth, “The Social Lives of the Amboseli Baboons,” Scientific American 320/1 (January 2019): 36-45: The goal of a project founded back in 1971 to study the baboons who live on the edge of southern Kenya’s Amboseli National Park has been... Read more
I mentioned the other day that among the classes that I’m teaching this term is Middle East Studies (Arabic) 467R, which is also listed as Philosophy 360R. The first book that we’re reading for the class is Lenn Evan Goodman, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan: A Philosophical Tale (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), where we’re focusing on Professor Goodman’s translation of a wonderful Andalusian text from the twelfth century. In that previous entry, I introduced the text’s... Read more
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New Testament Note 2
Luke 1:5-25 Out of all the things that could and should be said about Luke’s account of the appearance of Gabriel to Zechariah and the promise of the birth of John the Baptist, I choose to focus on one little detail that I find both funny, in a way, and significant: In verse 18, Zechariah, having just been told that he and his wife are to have a son, responds rather doubtfully, “I am an old man.”... Read more