The above was made and shared by Zeba Crook last year. As some pointed out in response, it has not always been their experience that the student experience takes place at low temperatures. As institutions of higher education struggle to stand out from the crowd, I found myself thinking about this subject once again. But it may be that recipes provide a useful analogy. Most recipes are not completely original or distinctive. What makes one particular chef’s chicken piccata better... Read more
As I was thinking about how to best wish readers of this blog a Happy Mother’s Day (since some of you are mothers, but all of you have or have had mothers), it struck me that there aren’t humorous biblical Mother’s Day cards the way there are for Valentine’s Day and other holidays. And so I thought I’d make one – inspired, as you can see, by the story of Moses. And then, having shared this one, I thought I should ask... Read more
This little-known poem is by Bram Stoker, better known as the author of Dracula. The one thing needful In Martha’s house the weary Master lay, Spent with His faring through the burning day. The busy hostess bustled through the room On household cares intent, and at His feet The gentle Mary took her wonted seat. Soft came His words in music through the gloom. Cumbered about much serving Martha wrought Her sister listening as the Master taught Till something fretful... Read more
I was delightfully amused to learn about the creative way that Steven Moffatt found to not only include the Peter Cushing Dr. Who movies within the world and thus also the canon of Doctor Who, but also to include Star Wars as well! For those who may not know them, there were two movies featuring Peter Cushing as Dr. Who, a human inventor of a time and space machine, and his interactions with the Daleks. In Moffatt’s stories, the Doctor... Read more
I had some really impressive creative products emerge from my class on the Bible and music this semester. But I think the one that blew everyone away more than all others was by Madi Blair. It provided one of those moments that an educator knows immediately they will remember for the rest of their career. Listening to the song, I started off by saying that clearly this was not the first song this student had written. She said that, in... Read more
The third episode of The Handmaid’s Tale is as profoundly religious as the previous one. In the details that it presents, as June tries to make her way to Canada, the show once again does something incredibly powerful. It tells a story of a white middle class American woman as first slave and then as displaced person seeking to become a refugee. Her experiences could be compared to the Underground Railroad, a form of which we learn has emerged to... Read more
It is ironic that some have treated the TV show The Handmaid’s Tale as anti-religious, when the show is profoundly religious in ways that this blog post (about the second and third episodes of the current second season) will explore. The reason for that reaction, however, relates very precisely to an aspect of the show’s message, which I may as well highlight from the outset: religions that start out as persecuted minorities regularly fail to recognize when they have transitioned... Read more
I leave the theme of creation until well into the semester when I teach the Bible and music. When we get there, I try to use it as an opportunity to explore and reflect on not only the meaning of the texts, not musical settings of those texts, but also students’ own creative activities. For their final project for the class, students are expected to produce a song or piece of music of their own. Since many of them do... Read more
Fred Clark wrote recently: Young-earth creationism is a cruelly efficient machine for manufacturing spiritual crisis. It has created more atheists than all of Richard Dawkins’ books put together. It exchanges the truth of God for a lie — a lie that’s spectacularly indefensible because none of the people caught up in that lie lives on a young Earth. They live, instead, on this one — this ancient Earth that confronts its inhabitants with its vast and incomprehensible oldness at every... Read more
Here’s a natural follow-up to yesterday’s post, one not inappropriate for the “Revenge of the 5th” even if it is not as directly connected with the occasion as yesterday’s post was. Bob Royalty shared this call for papers for a special issue of the open access journal Religions, of which he will be the guest editor, and which I know that numerous readers of this blog will be interested in: Call for Papers: Special Issue on Apocalypticism in the 21st Century Dear... Read more
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