This is the first post in a series blogging my way through Keith Ward’s most recent book, The Big Questions in Science and Religion. The first chapter is entitled “How Did The Universe Begin? (Is There An Ultimate Explanation For The Universe?)” Before I even managed to post on this topic, it was drawn to my attention that the question as posed seems to slant the issue in a particular way. To be fair, Ward’s understanding of divine creation, in... Read more

The newer batch of ICC commentaries on the Bible are fantastic and are, not surprisingly, not available for free. But the earlier series, many volumes of which remain valuable in spite of being nearly a century old, can now be found on the Internet Archive. Turning to these volumes is far better than merely browsing random web pages looking for information about a passage from the Bible. So I’m posting this, in the hope that in particular students, teachers and... Read more

This post has just one aim: to drive the annoying video about “Palin’s Apocalypse” off the bottom of the screen and safely into the realm of “older posts” where visitors to this site will not be forced to hear it begin every time they visit. Those who want to find it can always find it here. Read more

“Those of us who care for the integrity of religious faith have a corresponding duty to resist religion’s power” (Tina Beattie, The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2007) p.145). Read more

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