Tony Jones has posted on a topic that I also touched on recently, sharing some personal accounts of the difficulties faced by people who, because of their chromosomes and/or their genitalia, might be considered heterosexual according to one country’s laws and homosexual according to another’s. Read more

Chris Tilling offered a link to some really excellent, top notch New Testament scholars in videos on YouTube. But how can they compete with this video from Aaron Rathburn, presenting the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews in Star Wars format? Read more

I am offering a shorter review than I usually tend to of The Science Fiction Handbook by M. Keith Booker and Anne-Marie Thomas (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), not because the book has lesser value, but on the contrary, because the book is so rich, diverse and complex that it is difficult to summarize, other than in the form of a recommendation that, if you are interested in science fiction, and in particular if you are interested in serious academic study of... Read more

I suppose I ought to tackle this question, since I get people arriving at my blog daily after doing a search for the keywords “hermaphrodite sex”. Is Genesis 1:27c wrong or merely misleading? It makes it sound like God not only initially created but ordained that human existence should be typified by two sorts of human being, “male” and “female”. If that was the divine plan, would it be fair to say that it failed? Human beings do not consistently... Read more

Having (thankfully!) never been tagged with the “Honest Scrap” meme that has been circulating, I began formulating a somewhat twisted alternative. The meme works as follows. You post five things about yourself. Four are untrue. One is true. All are so outlandish, implausible or ridiculous that no one would be inclined to believe that any of them are true. And despite the pleas from your readers, you never divulge which is true and which are fabrications. You then tag five... Read more

Someone left a link in a comment to a site that explores the complicated issue of the origin of the word syllabus and the related issue of what its plural form should be. I’ll leave that subject to be debated by the English etymologists and Latinists among you. I shouldn’t have to worry in the mean time: since one course only ever has one syllabus at a time, I shouldn’t ever need to use the plural. Read more

Congratulations to Butler University, to all my colleagues and co-workers, on being ranked #2 in the recent U.S. News and World Report rankings, in its category of Midwestern Master’s level comprehensive universities! Read more

There are a few recent posts that I thought I’d highlight. First, Celucien Joseph has continued the conversation about Liberal Christianity. I’m not sure if he really gets what Liberal Christianity is (apart from a Conservative stereotype he may have heard), and I suspect he’d be surprised to find how many exegetes he’s read would fit aptly into that category. But at least the conversation is continuing. Next, Drew Tatusko explains that you might be a “liberal” even if you... Read more

As others have done, I’m sharing the syllabi for the classes I’ll be teaching this semester. The Bible The Historical Jesus Students will probably not look at them until classes start next week (some will most likely never look at them, but that is another issue), and so feedback and suggestions for improvement are welcome. Read more

I was looking for a reference (one that I remembered citing before in discussions of the use of “God” in a broader sense in the context of early Jewish and Jewish-Christian monotheism), and found it – embedded in a preview of my book The Only True God on Google Books! So I thought I’d share it here – perhaps it will persuade a few more people to buy their own copy. When it comes to matters of the Christology of... Read more