This was too funny not to share. It will probably only make sense to Battlestar Galactica fans, but that’s everyone who reads my blog, right? HT Galactica Sitrep Read more

A former student suggested I should show this to my class on the Bible. I’m not sure about that, but I definitely thought it was worth sharing here! Read more

As I’ve been blogging Keith Ward’s recent book The Big Questions in Science and Religion, I’ve also been reading Naturalism by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. The book, in essence, argues that strict naturalism is opposed not merely to a dualist view of human beings, but to theism. Many of the same issues that plague Ward’s discussion of this topic appear here, only in far worse form. At one point the authors, after quoting Jaegwon Kim on mental causation of... Read more

A colleague of mine sent around the following, which I thought I would share with a wider audience, since I know many educators read this blog: Why Do they Turn In Crap? 1. They Don’t Spend Enough Time. The typical student waits until the last minute to write an essay. She has worried and procrastinated but spent no time thinking and planning until she sits down to compose. Her writing process becomes her entry into the thinking process. Rather than... Read more

In many respects I found this chapter the most interesting and at the same time the most frustrating. On the one hand, Ward helpfully points out ways in which the notion of the soul that earlier Christian thinkers had in mind, for instance Aquinas, were far more in keeping with the Biblical/Semitic tradition than one might have expected. For instance, Ward asserts that Aquinas would have considered that one cannot simply substitute a new body and yet speak of it... Read more

Today in my Sunday School class we finished our introductory topic on the Bible in the “When Christians Disagree” series. We looked at the example of circumcision, which in Genesis 17 is quite plainly said to be a permanent and absolute condition of membership in the covenant people, even for those not actually descended from Abraham. We then turned to Acts 15 and looked at how the church (or at least part of the church) decided that it was going... Read more

IO9 suggests that it is time for sci-fi versions of familiar Bible stories. That could be interesting. If one ventures outside the Bible slightly, one gets books like 1 Enoch which already fit the genre. Enoch’s “ascension” shows the same sort of pre-modern cosmology I talked about in my last post, although the parallels make it more natural to talk about his “abduction”. Of course, the Left Behind movie also fits the genre – when I watched it (before teaching... Read more

In a recent post I mentioned the distinction Marcus Borg makes between naive and conscious literalism. At heart, the difference is as follows. Naive literalism involves someone (e.g. a Biblical author) treating something as factually true because he or she has no reason to believe otherwise. So, for instance, in the case of the ascension, why wouldn’t Luke depict Jesus as heading straight up into the sky? Presumably, had Luke lived today, he would have either described the scene differently,... Read more

Judy Redman wants to know what you think, so please pay a visit to her blog and participate in her poll! Read more

“The ascension is harder to believe in than the resurrection.” Someone made the above statement in a conversation we were having, and I immediately thought of something mentioned in chapter 5 of Keith Ward’s book The Big Questions in Science and Religion. After discussing briefly some traditional notions of time and space in cosmologies of previous ages, Ward writes (p.107), “We now know that, if [Jesus] began ascending two thousand years ago, he would not yet have left the Milky... Read more