I missed the 20th anniversary of the movie The Matrix, which transformed science fiction, cinema, and my life in a variety of ways. Just as today’s university students are too young to remember the movie as anything other than a “classic” their parents or an older sibling introduced them to, many readers of this blog may no longer recall that the original title of my blog was Exploring Our Matrix. It began as a venue for exploring side interests such... Read more
This call for papers grabbed my attention immediately in a way that few do: CALL FOR PAPERS Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Sherry Ginn and Michael G. Cornelius, editors of the forthcoming Serializing the Apocalypse: Essays on the Never-Ending End of the World, announce their intent to publish a new collection of essays about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Although this series ended twenty years ago this year, a stand-alone examination of the series has not been published to date. On air from... Read more
A call for papers that I thought I should share: Paradoxa Volume 32 Comics and/or Graphic Novels Call for Papers (anticipated publication date: December, 2020) Editor: Vittorio Frigerio (Dalhousie University)/ This issue of Paradoxa will explore comics and/or graphic novels. American histories of comics have traditionally highlighted what they deem the indisputable U.S. birthplace of this mass-culture phenomenon, pointing to Richard F. Outcault’s Yellow Kid (1895) as the first comic ever produced. Alternately, the European view tends to favor the creation of this ever-popular medium... Read more
I decided to substitute this news for the usual Wednesday blog post about my own podcast. I am delighted to announce that Rachel Koehler’s podcast about the Center for Interfaith Cooperation in Indianapolis, “The Dynamics of Interfaith,” which I have mentioned here previously, is now live! You can learn more about it in the first teaser episode (as announced recently on the Center for Interfaith Cooperation website). Here are the first few episodes: You can find others on the podcast site.... Read more
One could teach a whole semester-long course on musical settings of just one text, such as the Lord’s Prayer, and not run out of material. Indeed, one could probably do that for just one language or just one religious tradition and not run out of material, when it comes to a biblical text that has been set to music as often as the “Our Father” has. And if one includes allusions and references, the number increases exponentially once again. For... Read more
I was really struck by the article in Bible History Daily about how the story of Daphnis and Chloe echoes the story of Adam and Eve in Genesis. Here’s an excerpt: Written around 200 A.D. by the Greco-Roman author Longus, Daphnis and Chloe is a pagan pastoral romance that echoes the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Daphnis and Chloe are simple country-dwelling teenagers in love. They are the adopted children of pastoralists indentured to a far off Master. In... Read more
Tonight will mark the beginning of a conference in Romania focused on New Testament anthropology, at which I have the opportunity to present on work related to my project about John the Baptist. It has been really exciting to find things that I think are genuinely new insights emerging out of my efforts to bring the Mandaean sources into the picture, and approaching it via the question of John’s assumptions about human nature really helped. I will say more about... Read more
First, here’s a call for papers about fantasy and the anthropocene. CFP (edited collection): Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene | Brian Attebery, Tereza Dědinová and Marek Oziewicz (Eds.) “Fantasy’s main claim to cultural importance resides, I believe, in the work of redefining the relationship between contemporary readers and mythic texts. … [If we take] myth … to designate any collective story that encapsulates a world view and authorizes belief, … fantasy offers a glimpse into the process by which... Read more
Eboo Patel wrote a while back: The key argument for identity politics on the progressive side is redress of historical marginalization. In other words, because so many groups in American history were excluded because of their identity (blacks, women, gays, immigrants), it is high time that we create both cultural and policy solutions that tip the scales in their favor. The key argument for identity politics on the conservative side is that religion shapes the lives and communities of traditionally-minded Christians... Read more
Many blogs and social media posts are highlighting the publication of a new book from E. J. Brill, the latest volume in the Digital Biblical Studies series. I’m one of the contributors – my chapter is “Learning from Jesus’ Wife: What Does Forgery Have to Do with the Digital Humanities?” The volume is open access, and so you can read and download the entire book from the E. J. Brill website. Larry Hurtado was very kind to single out my chapter among the... Read more
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