Inspired by a different version created by Beau Quilter and shared on this blog here. What do you think? Does this get the point across about conservative-to-fundamentalist Christians in the United States in the present day, and their support for Donald Trump? I enjoyed learning more about the photographer behind the photo used in this meme, Antonio Guillem, and how he views the unpaid use of his photo for this meme. That article in turn led me to discover that there is... Read more
Charles Häberl recently taught a course on Mandaic in the Ukraine, and a video recording of the first lesson is available on YouTube. It provides an excellent overview of the academic study of the Mandaeans and their literature, before moving on to introduce the Mandaic alphabet as the starting point for learning the language, which is a dialect of Aramaic. If you know Syriac or Jewish Babylonian Aramaic, presumably some of the vocabulary words introduced at the very end of... Read more
So much time had passed since I did the above interview for Talk Gnosis, that I had forgotten that it had yet to appear. I’m glad it is now available, and think that you will enjoy the conversation about my book Theology and Science Fiction. It also mentions Gen Con (a previous year, but this makes for a natural connection with things that I have been blogging about recently). I also had the pleasure of talking with Ellen Duffer about... Read more
A student made a meme about modern theology and philosophy and shared it with a colleague, who in turn shared it with me, and I of course thought that I ought to share it with you. I’ve saved what I think is the best of these memes (one that I made myself, on a topic that I think interests most readers of this blog) for last, and you will find it at the bottom of this post. If you came here... Read more
Before turning back to the Gospel of John in my Sunday school class this past weekend, I shared information about the Butler Seminar on Religion and Global Affairs on the topic of “Religion, Refugees, and Migration.” As a point of entry into that topic, I asked students to investigate their own family history, and the interplay of religion and migration in it. When we turned to John 4 after that prelude, it struck me in a new way. Jesus and... Read more
On The Game Crafter site, where Canon The Card Game can be found, I came across a game related to the Reformation: Martin Luther: Life and Legacy. Another game on this theme that I’ve come across is Sola Fide. There is also a game by GMT Games called Here I Stand: Wars of the Reformation. And Reacting to the Past has a microgame, Cuius Regio. And don’t forget the one I saw at Gen Con, A Mighty Fortress. Has anyone played one or... Read more
Jim Davila has three lengthy posts about Samuel Zinner’s recent report on the lead books from Jordan, which we have good reason to describe as hoaxes or fakes, regardless of when they were produced, and regardless of when the materials are from. He writes: The people who made the codices made use of some coins from the various Jewish revolts, some other Hellenistic and Roman-era coins, and a second-century-CE grave epitaph. These are the sources for almost all of the text... Read more
My colleague Jessica Moore created this “pseudosyllabus” as a way of starting off her course on communication this semester. I thought it was fantastic, and she kindly gave me permission to share it. Read more
There are places in the world in which Christians are indeed persecuted. But the United States is not one of them. And so the results of a recent poll which asked which religious group faces the worst persecution is potentially very telling indeed. If you ask people which religious group faces the most discrimination, you get very different answers depending on their political alignment. Hemant Mehta kindly turned the results of the poll (which correlates the answer to the question about... Read more
Krista Dalton wrote an article for Ancient Jew Review about using Harry Potter to explore canon. Here is an excerpt from the article: The exercise generated intuitive criteria that the students used to construct their canon lists. I did not have to tell them to think about authorship, divine inspiration, or antiquity; they felt the intuitive pulls themselves. They found themselves weighing what they meant by authorship and what forms were deserving of canonicity. They were torn by the interjection... Read more
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