I’ve mentioned my Sunday school class at Crooked Creek Baptist Church on this blog on numerous occasions. But now I have a chance to invite you to sit in on a session, at least virtually. A couple that usually attends had to be absent yesterday, and we were due to cover a topic that one of them had requested. And so rather than just wait for them to return, they suggested that I record the class. And so, having done that, I... Read more
I had a commenter on the blog make the ridiculous claim that, since there is reference in the Jewish Scriptures to the riding of a donkey, we can therefore have no basis on which to conclude that such a thing actually happened in the life of Jesus. I would have thought it would be obvious that that makes no sense. After all, we wouldn’t consider it at all plausible if someone were to suggest that an American president could not... Read more
This sign was given as an example of a church sign fail, but I’m not sure that this Palm Sunday paraphrase is actually a failure. It gets your attention, makes someone who doesn’t know the Bible wonder if Jesus ever said something like this, and makes the person who does know the Bible smirk at the double entendre. Feel free to discuss the above sign, whether you think Jesus did in fact ride a donkey into Jerusalem, and if so, what... Read more
The quote comes from Douglas Cowan’s excellent book Sacred Space, which I reviewed on the blog back in 2012. Read more
See also Ted Herrlich’s post specifically on the Discovery Institute’s climate change denial. Read more
Having been blogging about safety and study abroad lately, I was interested to see a study by the Forum on Education Abroad which shows from insurance claim data that students are twice as likely to die on campus in the United States than while studying abroad. I’ll need to check the details more closely to see whether the amount of time spent in the different locations has been taken into account. If not, then presumably one could still argue that one is somewhat more... Read more
In addition to the irony that an atheist meme used an image of the library of an institution with religious roots and affiliation, which houses among other things the Book of Kells, to try to poke fun at Christians as purportedly readers of only one book, there is the additional irony that it speaks of atheist temples… Read more
I’ve been developing a course on the Bible and music, and so was delighted to see a review of a book on the topic appear in Review of Biblical Literature. The book is Bible & Music: Influences of the Old Testament on Western Music, by Max Stern. Here is a video of the author, reading from and talking about his book at Barnes and Noble: Stern is a composer himself, and so here is his piece “Biblical Landscapes”: He has also written... Read more
As I was thinking about the way Americans can misperceive danger elsewhere in the world compare to where they live, I was reminded of something amusing that happened the last time I was in Israel and the West Bank with students. One of the students had noticed an “X” hanging from the rear-view mirrors of cars, and had only seen them on cars in Arab areas. And so she wondered whether it might be something that Arabs were expected to have... Read more
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