As someone who studies mostly ancient history, I am hoping it will make a refreshing change of pace if I take on some research related to more recent times. One of those projects is to document the history of my own church, Crooked Creek Baptist Church. One of the things we learn when researching any period of history is how much we wish that someone would have written things down, or that something that was written would have survived down... Read more
Towards the end of last semester, I found myself growing increasingly fascinated – to the point of contemplating taking on yet another new research direction – with religious language used in recent debates about ecology, the environment, and conservation, as I participated in a faculty discussion group that is hosted by the Science, Technology, and Environmental Studies program at Butler University. There were so many ways that religion came up, from the emphasis of representatives of the “New Conservationism” that the... Read more
I was really struck by futurist David Brin’s comments about Abraham Lincoln’s words. He wrote: Lincoln does speak of “humane and Christian virtues —” as do today’s Red Letter Christians, who emphasize the caring, generous words of Jesus, and not the bilious hate-drenched Book of Revelation, or BoR. Notice that Lincoln gets almost science fictional, in speaking of “farthest posterity” — an implicit utter-rejection of the gleeful apocalypse yearning expressed by today’s End Times junkies, like president-in-waiting Mike Pence. I... Read more
This came to my attention via the NASCAS email list: Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute [www.bethmardutho.org] is seeking to appoint an Editorial Assistant for its open-access, peer-reviewed journal, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies. Established in 1996 with a first issue published in 1998, the journal is one of the early open-access, peer-reviewed journals to be born digital and is now in its twenty-first year. With the advancement of technology, the journal is planning to make full use of text-encoding standards such... Read more
I thought I would share the text of a response I gave to a question on Facebook about what led me to abandon young earth creationism, for those who may be interested: In my case, it was actually my eagerness to read more on the topic that led me to happen across a book called Science and Creationism that was a collection of essays cataloguing false claims that were at the heart of young-earth creationism’s case. One that I still... Read more
The diabolical heresy known as young-earth creationism is not simply wrong. It is much worse than that. It is an affront to one of the most basic teachings of Christianity and indeed of Abrahamic religions in pretty much all their forms. Whether one’s theological stance is theistic or panentheistic, and whether one views God as a being, or Being itself, or Creativity itself, the concept of God as Creator is about as fundamental as one can imagine. Young-earth creationism depicts... Read more
Yes! So exciting to see this call for abstracts on the Popular Culture and Philosophy blog! Contributors are welcome to submit abstracts on any topic of philosophical interest that pertains to The Good Place. The focus of this collection is, specifically, philosophical topics in The Good Place, but papers that connect to other work by series creator Mike Schur or the actors are also welcome, so long as the points made can be explicitly tied back to The Good Place.... Read more
Some thoughts from physicist and theologian Karl Giberson: As many of my FB friends know, I have been struggling to understand how and why evangelical Christians have become unable to make moral judgments when it comes to the Trump administration. I think I am starting to get a part of the answer based on some discussion about the Red Hen kicking out Sarah Sanders. When I think about that episode, I see it in moral terms. Sarah Sanders is a... Read more
I thought I would start this post by turning a comment I made recently on another post into a meme. One of the challenges of all conflict, for those concerned not about winning but about principles, is how to combat what we perceive to be evil without being turned into that which we hate in the process. Even on a pragmatic level, it is possible to recognize that lashing out in response to attacks can be counterproductive at the very... Read more
Yesterday I shared some things that came up in my Sunday school class, and since there has been a lot more written on this topic on blogs that I read, I want to share links to and excerpts from those other posts. Scot McKnight wrestled with much the same subject I blogged about yesterday, in a post about whether Jesus was violent. There he writes: So, what’s the big picture of Jesus’ ethical vision? Followers of Jesus serve rather than... Read more
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