Seriously, what were the NCAA thinking, scheduling a tournament game involving Butler’s basketball team on a day and at a time when there was already something much more important scheduled? Don’t they keep track of when John Walton is coming to speak on our campus? Boy, talk about not having your priorities straight! And David Henson at Unorthodoxology, I expected better of you than to use “NCAA” and “fun” in the same blog post when they’ve gone and done something like this.... Read more

Today in my religion and science fiction class we reached the topic of time travel, in conjunction with LOST at least initially, but really looking at the broader subject not only during this class period but also the next. There are key issues at the intersection of our concepts of time and religious thought. For time travel to the past to be possible, one has to have what is sometimes referred to as the “B view of time,” i.e. time... Read more

Jim Kidder has a guest post at An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution about being a Christian who grew up science-literate in a church in Japan and had a shock encountering young-earth creationism when he moved to the US. Scot McKnight says “Hey Mr. Falwell, read your Bible!” Hacking Christianity talks about justice. Bob Cornwall discusses social justice, the church and the state. Biblia Hebraica asks about scholarly filters through which we read the Bible. And via TheoPoetic Musings, a post about... Read more

From Cartoon Church via Irenic Thoughts Read more

Via The Primate Diaries, a “politically incorrect history of the evolution debate”: And on a related note, Michael Zimmerman explains why “Social Darwinism” is neither. Read more

Sabio Lantz’s review of The Burial of Jesus continues with a second installment: Approaching the Bible. Read more

 An article about my appointment to the Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature has appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Thanks to Rafael Rodriguez for being the one to let me know it had appeared!) Read more

http://widgets.clearspring.com/o/4ae8d36a3102598f/4b9c59c536767bab/4ae8d36a3102598f/f0582424/-cpid/743c700346724691 Read more

LOST Untangled on Dr. Linus LOST Slapdown Part 6 Read more

An ancient Gnostic reworking of Genesis (from which I will provide excerpts here) seems to provide an account of the origin of daylight saving’s time. Here’s the text (which in some places is fragmentary): …Now Yaldabaoth had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the Yaldabaoth made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden... Read more