This is the 1,000th post, and so I decided not to have it be about anything else other than the fact that this is the thousandth post. Thank you for reading! Of the 1,000 so far, which is your favorite? 🙂 Read more

Saturday Night Live’s version of the debate. If you haven’t seen it yet, enjoy! –><!– HT Shuck & Jive Read more

I wonder how many people outside of New Testament scholarship will remember that there was a book by Morton Smith some decades ago entitled Jesus the Magician. It may get a second look, now that a magical bowl has been found that supposedly refers to him (Jesus, that is, not Morton). In fact, the bowl mentions “Chrestus”, which is not the same as “Christus” (= Christ), although admittedly there is some confusion between and interchange of the two terms in... Read more

Progressive Christians are always looking for songs appropriate for communal worship, songs that do not use turns of phrase that do not really express a progressive Christian outlook. One of the best worship songs I know of this sort is called “I Will Speak Out“. Here are the lyrics: I will speak out for those who have no voicesI will stand up for the rights of all the oppressedI will speak truth and justiceI’ll defend the poor and the needyI... Read more

This post highlights a couple of less well-known fundamentalist groups which failed to make a major impact, but which may nonetheless be of historical interest. 1. Biblical Antipunctuationism There is no punctuation in either ancient Hebrew or ancient Greek, and thus there is no punctuation in our earliest manuscripts of the Biblical texts. The Biblical Antipunctuationist movement opposed the use of punctuation in Bible translations, and expressed their dissatisfaction by symbolically refusing to use punctuation themselves when writing. Why they... Read more

I’ve been reading Keith Ward’s latest book, The Big Questions in Science and Religion (West Conshohocken: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), with a view to reviewing it on this blog. I’m now reaching the conclusion that the best approach will be to blog about it chapter by chapter, since each chapter deals with such a “big question”. The book is, in essence, a philosophy of religion primer with specific focus on the relevance of the natural sciences (both their conclusions and... Read more

Tonight I had the wonderful opportunity to attend a concert by the Carmel Symphony Orchestra. I didn’t realize I would know several people in it, including my son’s current violin teacher and the teacher of his first teacher. I only found out about the concert yesterday, and quickly made plans to attend. The main reason was because the program included the Concerto for Horn and Orchestra by John Williams. I love Williams’ music – and not only his film scores.... Read more

“The irony should not escape us. Many conservative Christians oppose biological evolution while implicitly and unconsciously promoting a form of social Darwinism” (Roger E. Olson, How to Be Evangelical without Being Conservative (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008) p.137). “Luther is a hero to most conservative evangelical theologians. But the ironic tragedy is that too often they now fill the role of those inquisitors who demanded that Luther recant his newly discovered truths…But how can the church be reformed and always reforming... Read more

The following video from the American News Project highlights the religious beliefs typical of the Assemblies of God tradition with which Sarah Palin is connected, and the need for voters to ask her about beliefs which have political ramifications. Many were, I am sure, pleased to learn that her understanding is not that it is her responsibility to impose her moral views on others. But the question of whether she looks forward to an imminent apocalypse cannot but be relevant... Read more

Apparently I have been granted the sublime honor of being considered an associate member of the “Guild of Biblical Minimalists“. New Testament scholars cannot be full members, since we have too much useful historical material in the texts we study for it to be possible for us to attain to full-blown minimalism in our field. The number of posts so far is (perhaps appropriately) minimal, but I look forward to seeing what they do with this site. The potential for... Read more