I was really struck by a post on the blog Only a Game, coming as it did right when I was preparing to speak at Gen Con about gamification and the arts in higher education together with a couple of other Butler University colleagues. In it Chris Bateman writes: If a game console is a device designed for the express purpose of executing arbitrary programmatic systems for entertainment, then the deck of cards was the world’s first game console. All... Read more
My brother in law drew my attention to the above claim of the Ancient Aliens franchise, which I had somehow missed hearing about. I don’t watch the show, but it seems like the sort of thing that someone ought to have drawn to my attention before now! In the clip, Georgio Tsoukalas claims that Jonah was swallowed not by a whale (or even a big fish, if he wanted to get that detail right), but an Unidentified Submersible Object. His... Read more
Via both Ancient World Online (AWOL) and the Biblical Studies Blog, I learned about the Open Access Digital Theological Library This is a useful search engine for finding open access materials related to theology and religion. It is mostly a portal that curates materials in other sources such as Hathi Trust, and a number of those sources can be found elsewhere, such as the Internet Archive and Google Books. Nonetheless, I want to highlight this resource since it shows how important curation of this sort... Read more
This call for papers from a new online periodical, the Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, came my way and so I thought I should share it: Call for Papers: Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, Vol.2, 2019 From Dystopian Caves to Galactic Federations: Social and Political Philosophy in Science Fiction Stories. One of the main roles of science fiction has been to warn us (sometimes humorously, sometimes through grim pessimism) of looming social dangers: the product of particular ideas, technologies... Read more
The Internet Monk blog has a post about biblical interpretation that is worth quoting at length: The idea that “I don’t interpret the Bible, I just read it” is specious; superficially plausible, but actually wrong. The question is not whether you interpret the Bible, but whose interpretation you assume is authoritative. Many of us regular commenters on Internet Monk, have grown up in conservative evangelicalism. We have grown up assuming that conservative evangelical interpretation of the Bible was authoritative. To... Read more
I have rarely paid attention in the past to the way that Simon is referred to in Matthew 16. Once again I am forced to consider how frequently one can read the same text without failing to register certain details as significant. The term that is used there – Βαριωνᾶς – is striking, unique in the Gospels. It is clearly the Aramaic “son of Jonah,” and is perhaps most straightforwardly explained in terms of the author or his source remembering... Read more
There are actually multiple ways that graphic novels and comic books might intersect with academia. In this post, I’ll focus on the study of the genre, highlighting a couple of journals dedicated to the study of comic books that I learned about recently. But one can also express academic content through this medium as well, creating textbooks that incorporate image and text so as to convey meaning more clearly and accessibly either to students or to a wider public. Via... Read more
A couple of calls for paper on Christian apocrypha have come to my attention. Here is the one with the nearest deadline (but see below the text for images about not only this one, but another as well): CFP is now open for: “Visualizing Women in the Apocrypha,” Call for Papers for Special Session at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS 2019), May 9 to 12, 2019, Western Michigan University. The proposed session is devoted to the construction and... Read more
I am long overdue to return to family history research, and I expect to focus on one particular individual when I do, and not just the long genealogical chain with little detail that characterizes most family history research (at least, of the sort that I’ve done). I am referring to József Répászky, the Slovak theologian who was canon of the cathedral in Košice during part of the 19th century, and who appears in my family tree. It’s a topic in... Read more
Cristoph Heilig shared an experience of embarrassingly saying “should” when he meant “should not.” We all know that it does happen, even those of us who don’t think that the president misspoke rather than later backtracking or doing damage control. Indeed, there is a famous Bible in which they accidentally left out the negation in the commandment prohibiting adultery! Heilig’s post reminded me of an experience related to this, at least tangentially, in which can’t became can. The first time... Read more
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