I watched the Queen’s funeral live this morning. In addition to having lived in the UK for many years and being about to live there again for a few months, and in addition to simply wanting to be part of this historic moment, I also have a great love of modern British music and a strong interest in how the Bible is interpreted through music (the focus of an open textbook I have written that will be published soon). When... Read more
As the school year begins, parents and educators are thinking about students shifting gears from the things they’ve spent their summer doing to what they’ll need to do to succeed in their classes. Many may be fretting that students have been playing video games all summer, and wondering what effect this will have on their ability to concentrate and focus. Instead of wringing our hands, I suggest that video games provide reason to be cautiously optimistic. Whether playing something as... Read more
Recent years have seen a lot of firsts for me, publishing my first short story followed quickly by several others, including in subgenres ranging from flash fiction through to novelette. Now I’ve had my first poem published, assuming that posting them on my blog doesn’t count (nor anything that appeared in an elementary school creation). I have dabbled in poetry from time to time, and of course have written song lyrics, but it was the theme proposed for Volume 6... Read more
Great news from the Society of Biblical Literature! I suspect that every New Testament scholar is aware of and has benefited from things that were published in the SBL Seminar Papers – and that I am not the only one who has at times wished that some of the volumes were more readily available or accessible. Well, now they’ve been digitized! Dear Colleague, Each November from 1971 through 2003 the Society of Biblical Literature published a collection of papers that... Read more
A Palestinian-American comedian tweeted and then shared on Facebook this statement: “Elizabeth was a pious Palestinian woman who lived in Ein Karem, a village south of Jerusalem. She was the mother of John the Baptist, a Palestinian. And the cousin of Mary and Jesus, also Palestinians. Subsequently, some white people named their queens after her.” Before proceeding, let me mention that Palestinian did indeed have an equivalent in that era as a geographic term, Philistine Syria, that part of the region... Read more
I heard the news of the death of the longest reigning monarch in British history, Queen Elizabeth II, as I had been thinking about my upcoming trip to England, and reminiscing on the many years I spent their previously as a student. During my undergraduate days I was in close connection with conservative Evangelicals (although the vast majority of British conservative Evangelicals, with some exceptions to be sure, are nowhere near as extreme as their counterparts in the United States).... Read more
Qumran was the first major stop on this trip that I had been to on every single visit to the Holy Land. Even so, driving a rental car rather than either participating in a tour or leading a group of students meant that I could do things that I had not done before, such as hiking. I did not venture as far as it is possible to go, but am glad I explored the hiking trail at least somewhat. The... Read more
I thought I should write a blog post comparing lost Gospels to lost Doctor Who episodes after reading the recent post by Philip Jenkins on The Anxious Bench. Both involve things that are known to have existed yet of which we do not have extant copies. We sometimes have snippets of them. (We do have the full audio of the lost Doctor Who episodes, which makes our knowledge of them far superior to our knowledge of works like the Gospel... Read more
I am sharing the following announcement that Geoff Smith shared on Facebook: We are pleased to announce that the next meeting of the Nag Hammadi and Gnosticism Network will be held at Colorado College in Colorado Springs on November 16–18, just prior to the 2022 AAR/SBL Annual Meeting in Denver. We invite proposals for papers on any Nag Hammadi- or Gnostic-related text/topic. We are especially interested in papers that consider representations of Peter, apostolic authority, early Christianity in Rome, and/or consider... Read more
I wasn’t sure whether this should be in this post or my recent post about artificial intelligence and the book AI 2041, one of my posts about my trip to the Holy Land focused on John the Baptist, or separate. In the end I made it separate. I worked with two different kinds of AI platforms – one that produces text based on a prompt, the other two ones that produce images based on a text prompt – to see... Read more
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