Today in my Sunday school class we started a series on the creation stories. Before trying to ask how the natural sciences might cause us to reflect in new and different ways about God and our place in the universe, it is usually helpful for Christians to look first at the creation stories, and consider what they do and do not tell us. Today our focus was on the story of creation in 7 days found in Genesis 1:1-2:3. Many... Read more

Many thanks to NT Wrong for arising (like an ancient fertility deity or the Great Pumpkin) to list the top 50 biblioblogs for the month of January. I am grateful for the honor of being #1, but perhaps even more grateful for the other very interesting blogs that have once again been brought to my attention and that of others by this monthly listing. For those of you interested in the semi-retired NT Wrong, Jim West has an interview with... Read more

David Ker has composed this lovely prayer of repentance to be said after succumbing to the urge to forward a goofy email: God, I hang my head in shame.My idiotic emails have tarnished your name. Instead of spreading lucidity.I have been a proclaimer of stupidity. Words of praise to you should be my song.Not forwarded emails that are always wrong. Help me not to waste others’ time,But instead reflect on the divine. Make me a fool for Christ. I am... Read more

“We should not expect the Bible to answer the questions that arise from our own time and culture. Genesis was written to Israelites and addressed human origins in light of the questions they would have had. We should not try to make modern science out of the information that we are given, but should try to understand the affirmations that the text is making in its own context.” — John H. Walton, “The Creation of Humankind in the Ancient Near... Read more

A blog I just found out about, Entartete Musik, is blogging Korngold’s opera Die Tote Stadt. Read more

April DeConick has concluded that the Jesus reconstructed by Norman Perrin and by the Jesus Seminar are “bankrupt”. She helpfully clarifies that this doesn’t lead her to a “mythicist” position, because “parallels between Jesus’ myth and other ancient myths tell us nothing about whether or not he lived as a real person. It only tells us that ancient people cast their memories of Jesus into mythological narratives and schema that were part of their culture and minds.” Ben Witherington lets... Read more

Contrary to what I’ve still sometimes seen on web pages and blogs, we now pretty much have all the pieces of the puzzle to make sense of the presence of polar bears on the island. (1) Charlotte visited a site in Tunisia where a skeleton of a polar bear, wearing a Dharma Initiative logo on its collar, was unearthed. (2) The site where the donkey wheel is that moves the island is freezing cold. (3) When Ben moved the island,... Read more

I was surprised to read in today’s New York Times, in an article about the move to digital TV, a reference to “a public-service campaign that after Feb. 17 the rooftop antenna connected to [one’s] television would no longer function properly”. This is not in fact correct. When I purchased my current HDTV, I bought a new antenna that was supposed to be specific for HD/digital television reception. What I found was that it worked less well than the one... Read more

I watched LOST tonight with a bit of a delay, as my TV is on the fritz. Fortunately I was able to record it and then watch it on the computer screen. If you haven’t watched the episode yet, this post contains spoilers. The episode “Jughead” has so much that makes LOST great in it, including moments of human joy (for instance, the birth of Desmond and Penny’s son Charlie) as well as answers to mysteries (we now know that... Read more

“Just as science entered upon a new stage in its development when it replaced the deductive method with the inductive, so can religion parallel the progress of science by subjecting its own assumptions and processes to analysis.” — Mordecai M. Kaplan, Judaism as a Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1935) p. 309. Read more