Coming to Georgia College and State University for the semester provided the opportunity to meet librarian Jonathan Harwell in person. Chatting about ChatGPT and education, he clued me in that there is a line of questioning that consistently exposes the limitations of this chatbot software: ask it about the worst obscure song of a particular musical artist. Since I have a band whose music I know well, and whose output includes an obvious no contest winner for their worst song... Read more
Following up from my previous post (I started working on this one before that one, in case you were curious) I asked the AI chatbot Chat-GPT3 one of the key questions that I am seeking to answer in the book I am currently working on. From its answer, I don’t think I need to worry about being replaced. Human creativity can create new knowledge in the study of history in ways that AI currently cannot, because AI does not understand... Read more
We have been encouraged to think about how we teach in an era of AI-generated text, and I would be surprised if any educator didn’t naturally ask themselves hard questions immediately upon discovering what this technology can do. If you’ve followed these discussions you can safely skip to the next paragraph. For those who have yet to hear about Chat-GPT3 and may mistakenly think I’m talking about a droid with an English accent from Star Wars (that’s C-3PO), there is... Read more
Call for Abstracts [via Matt Brake]: Theology, Religion, and Dungeons & Dragons Edited by Scott Donahue-Martens and Brandon Simonson Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) that was created in 1974 and popularized in the 1970’s and 1980’s, though it has found a renaissance in contemporary popular culture due in part to its prominent role in the Netflix series Stranger Things. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a surge in virtual Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) gaming via work-from-home platforms such... Read more
I’ve commented on my blog before on Kirk Cameron’s anti-science position and things like that, and so I am obviously not sympathetic to the distorted brand of Christianity that he represents and promotes. I say this up front so that no one thinks that I am pretending to offer an “unbiased” view of his publicity stunt that today impacted the Indianapolis Public Library here in the city in which I live. Cameron had been seeking to host events in public... Read more
I have long loved the Christmas decoration that depicts the four phases of life in terms of Christmas. These are: The Four Stages Of Life: You Believe In Santa Claus You Don’t Believe In Santa Claus You Are Santa Claus You Look Like Santa Claus. These actually correspond quite well to phases in psychological maturation, faith development (Piaget), and interpretation of symbolic stories and myths (Ricoeur). Theologians have embraced these insights down the ages (think of Tillich’s treatment of myth,... Read more
It has been a month since my last blog post. I would have to check but I think that is a record for me. I decided early on, as I contemplated taking a full-year sabbatical for the first time in my life, that I would give myself permission to blog less and sometimes not at all, and do less with social media, limiting those interactions to the genuinely personally and professionally meaningful and to things relevant to my sabbatical research... Read more
Here’s what I’m doing at the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature joint annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. The first of my two papers on Monday 21 November is in session S21-136 of the Q program unit, which will take place from 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM in Room 203 (Street Level) of the Convention Center (CC). Here are the title and abstract: Q as a Source of Knowledge about John the Baptist In her groundbreaking study... Read more
At the weekly Friday coffee time at the Visiting Scholars Center at Oxford University’s Weston Library I had the opportunity to give a talk about the Mandaeans and the amazing collection of their manuscripts in the Bodleian Libraries, with some of those manuscripts on display, including not only the Book of John which I was involved in translating, but also Diwan Abatur which is an impressive illustrated scroll. They put lots of tables in a row to allow it to... Read more
While I was reading Andrew Perriman’s book In the Form of a God about early Christology (forthcoming from Cascade and available for preorder from the publisher and on Amazon), and his excellent and insightful treatment of Philippians 2:6-11, I found myself wondering whether anyone had suggested that the first verb, a participle, be understood in the present tense. In other words, Paul’s encomium to Christ follows on from his emphasis on being likeminded in relation to Christ: Have the sort... Read more
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