The day had finally arrived, and Col. Forrester breathed a sigh that was at once one of relief and of anxious anticipation. Their contact with the Yorok, the first extraterrestrial race of whose existence Earth had come to have definitive proof, had begun several decades earlier, when a team of radio astronomers had accidentally intercepted a message from a Yorok exploration team that was doing research in the Epsilon Eridani system. The message, which remained indecipherable, nevertheless was clearly not... Read more

There is a significant amount of music as well as the many books and backup copies of web sites at the internet archive. Here’s Paul Hindemith’s Nobilissimo Visione and Howard Hanson’s Serenade for Flute and Strings. http://www.archive.org/flow/flowplayer.commercial-3.0.5.swf?0.5155667281809887 Read more

GrrlScientist mentioned that the latest Scientia Pro Publica, number 22, has appeared. This is essentially a carnival of science blogging, with a particular focus on blogging aimed at helping a broader public understand science. Homebrewed Christianity continues the series on surviving the Christian right with a post on evolution. Josh Rosenau responded to Jerry Coyne’s call for Francis Collins to resign. And Steve Martin blogged about promoting a positive relationship between faith and science in evangelical churches. Steve Matheson continues blogging through... Read more

One of the subjects I’m currently working on is comparing the treatment of John the Baptist in Mandaean, Nag Hammadi, and other sources. I’m hoping to include for consideration as much material as I can from Christian and even Islamic sources, as these may be useful in helping to trace the influences on the Mandaeans and/or their influence on the literature and traditions of others. There are a few intriguing references. Kraeling’s bibliographical article on the Mandaeans mentions a Coptic... Read more

In spite of my recent posts on Google and research, I neglected to take my own advice and Google first before trying inter-library loan or other methods of obtaining an item. Here’s a Mandaic text (transcribed into Hebrew/Aramaic characters) with translation and discussion in German, which you can read online here, or read and download from Google books as part of the journal issue in which it was published in Zeitschrift für Assyriologie und verwandte Gebiete. Read more

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Brooke Lester has posted Biblical Studies Carnival LI over at his blog Anumma. Read more

The Butler Symphony Orchestra gave a wonderful performance today of Holst’s famous The Planets, accompanied by a creative montage of video footage. Richard Aulden Clark conducted. The image above is from NASA. Read more

Jeremy Thompson has posted the rankings for this month. Exploring Our Matrix came in at #5. Read more

Alan Lenzi has an interesting post, inspired by an SBL review that denigrated mainstream critical scholarship, which concludes with the suggestion that SBL ought to change its motto from “To foster Biblical scholarship” to “To foster critical Biblical scholarship.” While I appreciate the spirit of his post, the notion of “uncritical scholarship” seems to me to be an oxymoron (although that does not mean there are no examples of it). But more than that, it seems to me that the biggest... Read more