IO9 has a religion and science fiction piece worth sharing, on living like a Vulcan. Actually, you could have many of the debates people sometimes do about real-life traditions, now that I think about it. Is being Vulcan a matter of religion or ethnicity? Is it a religion, or a philosophy? The painting seemed reminiscent of paintings of Jesus, and so I thought I’d share it. And then of course my mind turned to Spock’s Beard,a progressive rock band which itself has... Read more

I don’t need any excuse to share Eric Whitacre’s music, but when he sets Hebrew lyrics to music, it seems especially appropriate to mention here. Here is a version of his Five Hebrew Love Songs for solo vocalist with violin and piano: And here is the more familiar choral arrangement: You can also find the composer and his wife Hila Plitmann, who is the lyricist, talking about these pieces online on Whitacre’s blog, and even the lyrics handwritten in Hebrew... Read more

It seems that I lean more towards a religious-scientific materialism than Keith Ward does, and am willing to view consciousness as an emergent property. Be that as it may, this is still a stimulating and at times humorous lecture by Ward. I’m posting it to encourage discussion, and would be very interested to hear why you find his arguments persuasive or unpersuasive. Read more

Jim Naughton at The Lead links to a Psychology Today blog which shares an e-mail from a pastor uncomfortable with bonobo behavior. Although the pastor in question seems to believe that after Adam and Eve ate a literal fruit from a literal tree of knowledge, God intervened in the world to force tectonic plates to shift and bonobos to start having homosexual intercourse, I think there are far simpler and more satisfactory ways to make sense of the available evidence.... Read more

Tom Verenna and I may disagree about lots of things. But here’s something we agree on. This is wonderful: Tina Guo performing Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No.1 in E flat major, Op. 107: II. Moderato– Watch more Videos at Vodpod. Read more

Many bloggers (including some with expertise precisely in the area where Beck seems to lack it) have pointed out how much Glenn Beck got wrong in his statement about Constantine and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Finally, a courageous blogger has stepped forward to treat Beck fairly and defend what he got right. And since someone asked me, here’s a recording of the program in which he made the statements in question. http://cloudfront.mediamatters.org/static/flash/player.swf Read more

There is a post about LOST at Doc Artz, which takes seriously the revelation that the show is at its heart profoundly theological. I particularly liked the artice’s way of putting things: in “The End” what we had thought were “flash sideways” were revealed to be “flash upwards.” Read more

If you think the pun in the title of this post is lame, you’ll be glad I decided not to make the one about being “atone deaf.” Ken Pulliam has been blogging about problems with the penal substitution theory of atonement. Yesterday he interacted with and shared parts of a post of mine on that topic. Read it and find out what he and I agree about and what we disagree about. I should also mention James Bradford Pate’s post, inspired by comments on... Read more

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In the discussion of Rob Bowman’s closing statement in the Great Trinity Debate at Parchment and Pen, I was asked what I think of the application to Jesus in the New Testament of verses which, in the Jewish Scriptures, refer to Yahweh. My answer is that Jews who believed God might bestow his name upon an exalted agent would probably have considered it appropriate to ask whether any of the texts mentioning Yahweh in the Scripures refer to the agent called by... Read more