Hemant Mehta drew attention to an article in the Star Tribune about meteorologist Paul Douglas, who is an Evangelical Christian and wants to persuade his fellow Christians to accept the evidence for climate change. The quote in the meme comes via the article, but is originally from his recent book, Caring for Creation. Read more
Via The Ancient Bookshelf, I learned about this “Modern Nativity.” It is apparently a real product – although ironically, one that you cannot buy on Amazon.com. I think that there is something more valuable than mere humor that can emerge when we ask “if this story were set in our time, what would be different?” Such exercises can help us understand both the story, and ourselves, a little better. Read more
Charles Häberl has written a blog post (and a follow-up, and then another which brings an eclipse into the picture) about the historical references in a section of the Ginza Rba which ought to be considered a Mandaean Chronicle. There is also a lecture he gave, “From Jerusalem to the Karûn: What Can Mandaean Geographies Tell Us?” online: The evidence is important and even exciting, and while there is still a serious risk of scholars turning their attention to the Mandaeans... Read more
Frauke Uhlenbruch organized and edited an issue of the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures which explores intersections between science fiction and the Hebrew Bible. I was delighted and honored to have been asked to write a final response article for the volume. The issue has now appeared online and so you can read it here: http://jhsonline.org/Articles/article_221.pdf It was great to see Frauke at AAR/SBL, and to meet other contributors to the issue face to face for the first time. Now I am... Read more
I found that there is one disadvantage to blogging on one’s phone: it can look like you are texting rather than taking notes or blogging, and so I wasn’t comfortable doing so while seated at the front in the Digital Humanities session where I presented on the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. And so I will have to tell you about that another time. The joint session of the AAR Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity and SBL Religious Worlds of Late... Read more
I attended a Council for Foreign Relations lunch that was simply fascinating. In a recent survey, Americans were divided almost evenly in their answer to the question of whether America has gotten better or worse since the 1950s. That mirrors the different campaign slogans in the recent election: the backward-looking “Make America Great Again” vs. the embracing of a diverse future in which we are “Stronger Together.” Two of the panelists focused in on Mexican and Muslim immigration. Many do... Read more
I was only able to catch the end of Brent Nongbri’s paper about the dating of papyri. It was David Ratzan, Sarah Goler, and James Yardley about the development of new non-destructive means of dating carbon-based inks, in order to assess the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife. They did not set out with the hypothesis that the spectrography and date would correlate. They use Bayesian probability in relation to the reference set of ink on papyri which contain a date and... Read more
I am so grateful to Jorunn Buckley for organizing a meeting between scholars who work on the Mandaean religion, and two representatives of the Mandaean community here in San Antonio. We had fascinating conversations about the challenges their scattered small communities face, and explored practical ways that scholars might be able to support them. Read more
Before heading to the 1pm Digital Humanities session on scholarly communication, I saw a tweet saying that if publishers want to reach the public and have them well informed, we cannot continue to make academic books so ridiculously expensive. In the session, John Kutsko talked about SBLCentral, a project to move beyond RBL to a system that will notify scholars of relevant publications, as well as papers and programs at the annual meeting, based on keyword tagging in member profiles... Read more
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