Via Butler University Libraries on Twitter. Read more
Via Butler University Libraries on Twitter. Read more
The composer Szymon Laks‘ music deserves to be better known than it is. So too does his life. The title of his book, Mélodies d’Auschwitz, probably gives you a clue as to why I say that. He responded to the horror of being in the most notorious concentration camp during the Holocaust by making music. In the face of atrocities there is a need for all kinds of actions, including those that refuse to let that which is beautiful simply... Read more
A statement from the steering committee of the SBL Early Jewish Christian Relations program unit: As scholars devoted to the topic of early Jewish-Christian relations, we are saddened by the executive order barring admission of non-citizens from predominantly Muslim countries, including those with legally-issued visas, into the U.S. We know all too well the result of scapegoating others by virtue of religious differences. The persecution of Christians in the first few centuries, and the subsequent persecution of Jews through the... Read more
Coming up on February 22nd is an exhibit and performance connected with the seminar on religion, spirituality, and the arts run by Sandy Sasso. It will include a performance of Aaron Copland’s “In The Beginning,” and so I am delighted to be able to get the students from my course on the Bible and music to hear an important piece of relevance to the course in a live performance. I arranged the topics so as to have our discussion of creation... Read more
Two online sources have suggested that Donald Trump resembled either Nero or Commodus. Any chance that we could persuade him to take a “Which Roman Emperor Are You?” quiz and tweet the results? Surely that would settle the matter. Then we could focus on the more serious issue: the fact that the current U. S. president resembles more than one Roman emperor closely enough that there is debate about which he resembles the most… Read more
The Metacriticism of Biblical Scholarship unit in the Society of Biblical Literature expresses its opposition to the Executive Order issued by President Donald J. Trump on January 27, 2017, that immediately suspends entry of citizens of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen into the United States. We recognize that the Bible bears contradictory views about immigrants, and we do not utilize the Bible as an authority to set any government policy or to oppose any government policy. Our... Read more
I literally laughed out loud when I reached the end of this SMBC comic. I have been watching Colony, which turned out to have some very interesting religious elements in it. It is a story of alien invasion set in the United States, which raises questions about how we view those who build walls and those who seek to circumvent them, about collaboration and about those who engage in acts of terrorism against their oppressors and those who collaborate with... Read more
I couldn’t resist sharing this meme, falling as it does at the intersection of religion and science fiction. I would also like to seize this opportunity to thank Episcopalians for their efforts on behalf of aliens in the terrestrial sense – refugees and immigrants. And I should mention as well that in my book Theology and Science Fiction, I explore a neglected intersection of the Bible and science fiction: reading the Bible’s mentions of “aliens” in a science fictional sense. I had... Read more
HT Danut Manastireanu Read more
In everyday parlance, a contemporary means someone who lived at the same time as another person. In conversations with mythicists, Paul is dismissed as not a contemporary of Jesus, because he did not (as far as we know) see him while he was alive. But this brings into focus one of mythicism’s many problematic aspects. Mythicists often insist that Jesus was a significant figure in his time, so that we ought to expect historians to have mentioned him and satirists to have... Read more
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