The Israel Antiquities Authority has an interesting piece on their website about ancient games, some of which have survived down to the present day not only in the Middle East but beyond, such as Mancala! Read more
The Israel Antiquities Authority has an interesting piece on their website about ancient games, some of which have survived down to the present day not only in the Middle East but beyond, such as Mancala! Read more
A cartoon by Tim Davis. Yet another attempt to make sense of this disturbing story in Genesis, and one especially appropriate for today… Read more
I am in Italy for the first time, and will be heading to Camaldoli today by way of Arezzo to attend the Enoch Seminar on John’s Christology and/as Jewish Messianism. Jim Davila mentioned that the last time he was there the wifi was “primitive,” and so liveblogging the conference may not be possible. Yesterday I spent the day squeezing in as much sightseeing as I possibly could (my phone’s health app tells me that I walked nearly 15 miles). I... Read more
To mark the occasion of my first visit to Rome, I thought I would share the above cartoon. It illustrates one of the practical reasons why something like the study of religion might not be as irrelevant for entrepreneurs as is sometimes claimed. In fact, I had this confirmed to me recently when my colleague Chad Bauman and I met with an alumnus of Butler University, Karl Hofstetter, who majored in religion and who went on to become the president... Read more
David Brin shared a free short story of his on his blog, “Reality Check” from his book Insistence of Vision. I’ve been meaning to mention it here for a while. It explores the notion that “deification” might be a “filter” that explains why we have not encountered other intelligent species. Read the story to find out more. See also my review of his novel Existence which I posted here back in 2012. Read more
I’ve had a draft post saved for almost a year, since John Shuck, Gavin Rumney, and David Williams wrote pieces about emergence and God. One possible view of God is that God is the highest level of emergent order of the universe or multiverse. This viewpoint is sometimes labeled “Radically Emergent Theism,” although nowadays I think that using “panentheism” rather than “theism” might be more apt, even if this is a very specific brand of pantheism. It seems like the... Read more
Via The Dice Tower, I learned of this archaeology game: It seems to me that either the game as it exists, or a variation on it, could have some pedagogical value. At GenCon last year, I participated in a game demonstration simulating excavation of prehistoric human fossils and artifacts. Thoughts? Have any professors of archaeology and related subjects used gaming to teach? Read more
I received this question via e-mail and thought it might be useful to share it publicly together with my answer: I was listening to a YouTube video when this came up. Paul says in 1 Cor 11:23 “For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you”. I never really thought about this as a Christian, but what does this mean? My traditional understanding would have been that Paul had learned about the Last Supper from the other... Read more
It will take some time to process and share many of the thoughts I had during my recent visit to many places I had been before in Israel and the West Bank, and to places I had never been before especially in Jordan. Among the latter was Wadi Rum, which I only learned after I was there was a location where filming was done for the movie The Martian. The landscape of red rock really does seem like it might... Read more
There is a useful comparison that can be made between the cosmological “Big Bang” and the moment of origin of Christianity and the perception that a historical figure named Jesus can be found there. In both cases, there have been individuals who insisted that the conclusion coincided too well with Christian dogma to be trustworthy. In both cases the science or history was found to be sound. It is appropriate to look carefully when someone’s conclusions and their ideology converge,... Read more
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