You may have gathered that my post about Jesus’ exaltation as the early Christian gospel, with lots of links related to Christology, started out as an engagement with a particular post, then a series of posts on that blog, and then became a dump for links related to the theme of the blog post, which then languished for a long time because it had become so unwieldy. Well, here is another blog post with a similar history. Hopefully many of... Read more
There was some fascinating discussion a while back of the idea that what early Christians proclaimed as good news was not that Jesus died for forgiveness of sins, or that the end-of-time resurrection had begun, so much as that Jesus had been exalted to God’s right hand and installed as God’s vice-regent. Andrew Perriman blogged in several posts about Matthew Bates’ book, Salvation By Allegiance Alone, which is focused on the meaning of “faith” in the New Testament, but in the... Read more
I enjoyed the television show Timeless immensely ever since it first started, and now that the show has concluded, I want to blog about it, as perhaps I should have done episode by episode all along. The idea of temporal terrorism was just coming into view on Star Trek: Enterprise when it was cancelled, and other than the Spanish TV series that Timeless ripped off was inspired by, there hasn’t really been an exploration of precisely this scenario. And so... Read more
Here is the supersized ReligionProf Podcast that was released as a “Christmas Special” yesterday, featuring Rev. Dr. Christopher Benek, whom many of you will be familiar with as a leading figure in the Christian Transhumanist movement. You can learn more about that movement through the digital magazine Superposition, as well as the website for Benek’s ministry, the CoCreators Network, which has as its slogan “Better People, Better Tech, Better World”: https://www.cocreatorstech.com/about/ He also has a channel on Twitch. Of related interest, Sojourners... Read more
Merry Christmas to all those who read my blog and celebrate this holiday! To all others, I either wish you a happy day, or that you start reading my blog, or both! To mark the occasion in a manner appropriate to one of my blog’s major focuses, here are some sci-fi themed Christmas songs. I’ve begun working on a project about progressive rock and theology, and so am glad that there is a connection to be made with this! Please... Read more
There have been quite a number of interesting posts about John the Baptist over recent months, and given my interest in the historical figure of John, I’ve been making a note of them, with the intention of returning to them when time permitted, or when it seemed a particularly appropriate time to write about John. And since John is the focus of attention during Advent, viewed as the voice crying in the wilderness preparing the way of the Lord whose... Read more
As promised, here is my blog post about Michel Faber’s novel, The Book of Strange New Things. I listened to it as an audiobook, allowing me to finally get to it after having had it recommended to me by several people. For anyone who enjoyed Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, this is similar inasmuch as it focuses on extraterrestrial mission work and theodicy, but also very different beyond that in terms of its plot, its overall feel, and the way it broaches... Read more
I recently listened to two science fiction books with religious themes as audiobooks. One is Phillip K. Dick’s VALIS, and the other is Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things. What follows in this post and the next will contain spoilers about both, but hopefully not such as will ruin anyone’s enjoyment of either. After all, neither is exactly a brand new book, and VALIS is decades old at this stage. And so I’ll proceed assuming that my role is to persuade you... Read more
In a sermon towards the end of 2015, the (now former) pastor of my church encouraged us to do what the disciples are depicted as doing in the early part of the Gospel of John: tell our story. It had been a long while since I’ve done so here, and so I thought I’d seize the opportunity. But for some reason it didn’t happen right away, and got saved as a draft post. When the Patheos Progressive Christian began getting bloggers to share... Read more
I’ve followed the recent discussions about the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with interest. But it took me a while to realize that they provide a close analogy to discussions about the Bible and its interpretation. Here are some of the key claims that various people have been making in relation to the song: The original text, the sheet music, has the male character labeled “wolf” and the woman “mouse,” leading some to describe the song as “predatory.” (This is true... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In