Last night I watched two of the three parts of the Discovery documentary Who Was Jesus? There was quite a bit that I liked about it, as well as there inevitably being claims and details that were problematic, inaccurate, or oversimplified. I liked that they visited a number of important sites and used CGI to show what the sites might have looked like in Jesus’ time, restoring the walls of buildings and their frescoes, for instance. I also appreciated the use of bones from first... Read more

After Battlestar Galactica and LOST Last Suppers, this may not seem all that interesting. It also seems to reflect the mistaken idea that a “last supper” is a get-together of all the great figures connected with a particular tradition. This illustrates well why understanding cultural references before adapting them is important. Although I can get Stephen Hawking as Albert Einstein’s “beloved disciple,” I don’t think the person who made this was even aware of depicting Louis Pasteur in the role... Read more

I didn’t invent this – I found it at Miami Hawk Talk after a friend pointed it out to me. But I had to share it, given the seriousness of the issue and my direct connection to it: NCAA To Investigate Butler Basketball INDIANAPOLIS–Butler’s run in the NCAA Men’s Basketball National Championship Game may be tarnished after reports surfaced today that all 15 players on the roster are being given good educations in an effort to help them find good jobs after... Read more

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The title of this blog entry is a phrase that came up in Sunday school yesterday. We were continuing our discussion of Leviticus 19 and the question of why we do some things the Bible says but not others. The suggestion was made that we should preserve the valuable stuff but discard or ignore “the stupid stuff.” I think most people would agree with this statement. What we would find disagreement about is what “the stupid stuff” is and how... Read more

At TheoFantastique, there’s an interview with Robert Geraci about his work on robots and the sacred. At IO9, a reflection on Dune‘s elevation of humans to godhood. Read more

Daniel and Tonya expressed their disappointment that an app that made the iPad look like a Star Trek device has been withdrawn. I would like to point out that PCs already exist that meet StarFleet specifications. First, for less than the price of an iPad, get yourself an Asus Eee PC Tablet. It is a full-fledged PC, running Windows 7, with a keyboard if you want to use it, and needless to say capable of multitasking. Next, make your desktop background an LCARS... Read more

Recently in my religion and science fiction class (inspiring a number of recent posts on the class blog) the assigned reading was an article by Aaron Smuts, a draft of which is online. The final version appeared as “‘The Little People’: Power and the Worshipable,” in Philosophy in The Twilight Zone, eds. Lester Hunt and Noël Carroll (Blackwell, 2008). There is also another piece by Smuts on a related topic. Science fiction provides a striking number of stories through which... Read more

My review of Gerald O’Collins, Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus (Oxford University Press, 2009), has just appeared in Review of Biblical Literature. Read more

Here are the latest humorous recap and the first ever LOST batting challenge: There are some genuine Lost revelations in the second of the videos, which explains how Nicky and Paolo’s death was decided on. True love is unraveling everything. Namaste, brother. Read more