SPOILERS AHEAD! The episode begins with the Doctor exiting the TARDIS on a frozen landscape and beginning to regenerate, and shouting “No!” That’s certainly a dramatic way to lead into the first part of a season finale! After the credits, we see a 400-mile space ship trying to reverse away from a black hole. The TARDIS materializes on the bridge, and Missy exits introducing herself as “Doctor Who.” Missy says that is his real name, which he chose, but then... Read more
I watched the first couple of episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale miniseries. It does a good job of moving Margaret Atwood’s story into the present day, and of exploring the inner life of Offred’s thinking. The story explores a world in which biblical fundamentalism is used to justify coping with rampant infertility by turning fertile women into commodities. The selective use of the Bible by those in power is highlighted, when Offred hears a teacher say “Blessed are the meek” and... Read more
This job announcement came to my attention via the NASCAS e-mail list, and I thought it worth sharing here. The Institute for Medieval Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is seeking a Digital Humanist (f/m; 50%) with experience in XML-technologies and the development of language corpora. You will join an internationally networked team, pursuing research on the border between up-to- date ICT and humanities studies in the context of the ERC Starting Grant Project HUNAYNNET – Transmission of Classical Scientific... Read more
Richard Beck shared this quote from St. Columban, and it immediately struck me as memeworthy. Since Columban was using words to instruct in the very act of writing this, we are protected from going to an extreme to which the one who wrote these words would not have wished. In their broader context, the emphasis is on how one lives, on humility, as an alternative to disputes about doctrine which often do not merely distract from, but actively undermine, those other emphases. Think... Read more
The above piece by Steve Reich takes its inspiration from the shared sacred site marking the burial place of Abraham. It is one of the sites in the Holy Land that made the biggest impression on me. On the one hand, Hebron today is a place of serious tensions. Visiting, one sees Palestinian homes from which a ladder allows them to climb out a rear window on the Palestinian side of a checkpoint, rather than go through their front door and... Read more
Please find below a call for participants and papers for ReLACS 2017 (Regional Late Antiquity Consortium Southeast) to be held on October 19-20, 2017. ReLACS, now in its fifth year, is a annual workshop of scholars of Late Antiquity held on a rotating basis at Vanderbilt University, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Kentucky. The 2017 meeting will be hosted by the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies and the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Participation... Read more
I had used the phrase “cherry-picking” plenty of times, metaphorically, in relation to the Bible. But I had never literally picked cherries. However, a few years ago we planted a cherry tree in our yard, and just recently I had the opportunity to pick cherries for the first time in my life. And so here are a few things that I learned from the experience, which I think can be applied to the metaphorical use of “cherry-picking”: You need to find the good ones.... Read more
The story begins at Devil’s Cairn in Scotland, with a girl who wants to listen for music, and a boy who says it is ghosts who may drag her to hell. On a stone cairn nearby, we see the TARDIS carved. The Doctor, Bill, and Nardole go back to the 2nd century looking for the ninth legion that disappeared, as a result of a debate about who knows more about Roman Britain. The Doctor talks about the Picts and their... Read more
I received an e-mail about an older blog post of mine that I linked to in a recent post, and thought I would share it, and my response here. James, I read your “Just Sayin” post today and clicked through your link to your post from 2010 about Eccles 2: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/religionprof/2010/03/the-inerrancy-of-ecclesiastes-92-6.html Not sure if you’ve had any dialogue about it over the past seven years, but I hold to Biblical inerrancy and I don’t see it at odds with any... Read more
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Is Science Fiction Prophecy? Is Prophecy Science Fiction?
One of the questions I posed in my class on religion and science fiction last fall was about the relationship between prophecy and sci-fi. The key question is whether predicting the future and getting it right is the point of these two genres. On the one hand, if Jesus predicted the end of history and full dawn of the kingdom of God during the lifetime of his hearers, does that invalidate his message the same way that the presupposition of... Read more