Rachel Held Evans wrote on Facebook, and gave me permission to quote it: I confess. Sometimes I need reminding it doesn’t go like this: “Dear friends, let us be right, for being right comes from God. Everyone who is right has been born of God and knows God. Whoever is wrong does not know God because God is right…No one has ever seen God, but if we are right, God lives in us and his rightness is made complete in... Read more
I am grateful to Christian Askeland for drawing attention to this documentary, made by students from right here in Indiana! Read more
I am delighted to have the privilege of participating in a blog tour about fellow Patheos blogger Morgan Guyton’s book, How Jesus Saves the World from Us: 12 Antidotes to Toxic Christianity. Throughout the history of ancient Israel and of Christianity, there have been voices that have had an impact through their combination of humility, insight, confidence, relevance, and eloquence. We think of them as prophetic figures, but they haven’t been lone voices. They have just said what needed to... Read more
Via the blog Joe My God, I learned about an effort to amend the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, called the “Do No Harm” Act. Here is a quote from the press release: The Do No Harm Act would clarify that no one can seek religious exemption from laws guaranteeing fundamental civil and legal rights. It comes in response to continued efforts across the country to cite religious belief as grounds to undermine Civil Rights Act protections, limit access to healthcare,... Read more
You may think I’m a “silly boy” for writing about this. But when Sarah Bond recently wrote a blog post about the ancient Greek use of a tag (sillybos) to indicate the author and title of a work on a scroll, I felt I needed to blog in a bit more detail about the possible implications of this practice for the study of the New Testament, which Bond mentioned briefly. Not that this has not come up before. But one will often... Read more
I'm looking forward to visiting Caesarea Maritimia again in about two weeks' time with a group of students from Butler University and Christian Theological Seminary. It's one of the early stops on our visit of Israel. For better or worse, we won't be diving underwater when we're there. But here's a wonderful video and press release from the Israel Antiquities Authority about the recent finds made by divers exploring a shipwreck off the coast. The 1,600 year old ship contained... Read more
I wanted to share the above anyway, just for laughs. But I think it makes a nice pairing with a point that John Pavlovitz made today, about the fact that America is not undergoing worse moral decline than in the past. Here is an excerpt from his post: America is not in decline any more than at any time in its history. This is just lazy religious-speak that seeks to paint the picture of everything being terrible so it can name drop the “Last... Read more
Don’t miss the special issue of the Journal of Religion, Media, and Digital Culture focused on ancient Jewish, Christian, and Arabic literature. It includes articles such as Carrie Schroeder’s on “Digital Humanities as Cultural Capital,” as well as an introduction by Claire Clivaz. Want still more open access scholarship. Be sure to follow the Ancient World Online blog. Just in the past few days, they’ve shared or highlighted a comprehensive list of JSTOR’s holdings about the ancient world, a list of Classics... Read more
Internet Monk shared this wonderful example of the problems with claims about the “plain meaning” of a text. The sign above is from the UK. And so, while an American will understand it to be prohibiting people who serve as coaches of a particular uniquely American sport from entering, it not only refers to soccer, but to coaches in the sense of buses. Context matters more in some contexts than others. But it always matters. Read more
Post-doctoral Cataloging Fellowship at HMML The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) announces a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in Eastern Christian Manuscript Cataloging beginning as soon as July 1, 2016. The Fellowship is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation within a larger project to catalog recently digitized Eastern Christian manuscripts. Under the guidance of Dr. Anton Pritula, Lead Cataloger of Eastern Christian Manuscripts, the Cataloging Fellow will undertake original cataloging of digital manuscript surrogates at HMML as well as... Read more
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