I have had a draft of a blog post for a while, which was initially entitled Saint John Coltrane, but expanded to touch on enough other topics that I broadened the title. But an upcoming event in Indianapolis made me think I should finally finish and publish the post. And so I’m doing so, starting with the details of the event in question: A Love Supreme – John Coltrane Tribute – Indianapolis Jazz Collective presented by Indy Jazz Fest Sunday,... Read more
Andy Hickman kindly reviewed my book Theology and Science Fiction on Goodreads. Here’s how his review starts: James McGrath asks a lot of questions – great questions, necessary questions! This is the book that I have long wanted to write myself, let alone read. McGrath’s observations echo those that many of us have percolating within our minds and hearts. Over the past year I have read and re-read this book, often pausing after having looked at a paragraph – wishing I... Read more
This week’s podcast features Thomas Jay Oord. His latest book is called God Can’t, and the title sums up the central idea of the book pretty well. I mentioned the book in my Sunday school class last week, having already recorded the podcast and knowing it would be released this week. We found ourselves talking about the very pressing issue that drives the argument of the book, namely the tendency of religious people to interpret tragic and horrific events in... Read more
You know the experience. You are reading something that should be familiar, and yet something new and unexpected jumps out at you. That’s what happened to me not long ago, while reading the Greek New Testament in church on my phone. One word literally jumped out at me. Well, it literally jumped out at me in the sense that a pop-up window jumps out at you. The word ἐναγκαλισάμενος occurs twice in the New Testament, both times in Mark 9-10. And... Read more
I recently had a review I wrote of Kevin van Bladel’s book, From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣābians of the Marshes, published by the Enoch Seminar. Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite: Unfortunately, as van Bladel seeks to situate Mandaean origins in a Sasanian context, he is prone both to overstate his case, and to summarily dismiss evidence that does not fit well within the framework of his preferred scenario. For instance, the possibility that the “books of John and... Read more
From Eboo Patel’s recent article in Inside Higher Education: My larger point is this: in an era of higher ed where identity is king, diversity education often means unmooring some people from their identities while working hard to tether other people more deeply to theirs. The standard view appears to go like this: a white middle class Evangelical man ought to be unmoored from his identity, a working class black Muslim female ought to be more deeply anchored in hers.... Read more
I’ve developed a rhythm to my sharing of items of interest on social media. That includes, but is not at all limited to, my posts on this blog. I am on Facebook (where I have a page for my blog that you can find by searching for ReligionProf) and on Twitter (also as ReligionProf), as well as on LinkedIn and Instagram. I usually use Buffer to space out that sharing, so that it is not all happening just in concentrated... Read more
I wanted to preface my review of the movie Bohemiah Rhapsody (which I posted yesterday) with some of the thoughts and interest I brought with me to the movie. But I soon saw that those would make much more sense in a separate post, and so I am including them here. I’ve begun working on a project about progressive rock and theology, and I was rather stunned when I read where Jerry Ewing, in his book Wonderous Stories “While no one would... Read more
I finally got to see the movie Bohemian Rhapsody this week, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, from even before the movie proper began, when the standard instrumentation on the 20th Century Fox fanfare was replaced with Queen style guitars playing the melody. The film teases where it will end – Live Aid – before rewinding to London in 1970, with Farrokh Bulsara (who will later go by Freddie Bulsara and then Freddie Mercury) working at Heathrow Airport. His family is a... Read more
This week’s episode continues my most recent conversation with computer scientist Ankur Gupta. Ankur is surprisingly humble given some of the things that he has worked on. We have read Safiya Umoye Noble’s book Algorithms of Oppression, and have begun working on an article that interacts with it, and in the process I learned that he worked on the development of the very algorithm used in Google searches of the sort that is the focus of Noble’s book! I hope... Read more
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