Pete Enns’ blog has moved. Above, and below, is a sample from a new post on his blog in its new location: At the end of the day the human thought process can only get you so far when it comes to God. At some point, for most of us, as it was for some biblical writers, God stops making sense. The question then is whether the non-sense leads to disbelief in God or becomes an invitation to seek God differently–even through confrontation... Read more
Ronald Way recently interviewed Hershel Shanks on the Crossing the Line podcast, and Shanks gave a preview mention of something that will be appearing in coming months in Biblical Archaeology Review. He says that he gathered together some of the world’s best experts on paleography to reexamine the James ossuary, and they agreed that the inscription is authentic. If you are interested, have a listen to the podcast. This of course has been Shanks’ stance on the artifact all along. And he... Read more
I had a book by Matt Rawle, published by Abingdon Press, drawn to my attention today. It is The Salvation of Doctor Who: A Small Group Study Connecting Christ and Culture (The Pop in Culture Series). I tend to be wary of small group studies for religious believers focused on popular culture, since they typically point out Christ figures and deal with religious themes and symbols in the story in other such superficial ways. But Abingdon is a good publisher, and so... Read more
Tony Burke mentioned that the website for the upcoming York Christian Apocrypha Symposium has been updated. Click through for details about the papers that I and other presenters – who include Bart Ehrman, Annette Yoshiko Reed, Mark Goodacre, Carrie Schroeder, and Stanley Porter – will be giving. The title of my paper is: “Slow Scholarship: Do Bloggers Rush in Where Jesus’ Wife Would Fear To Tread?” Click through for an abstract. Read more
I used a photo of A. J. Jacobs trying to live Biblically as the background image. He at least tried to an extent that few who claim to be “Biblical” or “literalists” or both ever do. See his book, A Year of Living Biblically, which I have mentioned here before. See also Rachel Held Evans’ AYear of Biblical Womanhood, and also my blog post about why my book idea for A Year of Living Justly never got off the ground. Read more
Horror of Fang Rock sees the Doctor and Leela arrive on the coast of England near a lighthouse as a spooky fog is coming in. Steven Moffatt recently commented on the episode’s coolness. It is very much in the vein of those episodes of Doctor Who which are predominantly horror – something mysterious and monstrous is killing people. That the threat happens to be alien is persistently the case on Doctor Who, but the dominant genre is horror nevertheless. But the addition... Read more
Chris Skinner posted on his blog a follow-up to his post about citing online sources, and in particular blogs. I thought this excerpt was worth sharing with a wider audience. By and large, those who appear to reject peer review or find it objectionable seem to be those who want a broad hearing for their ideas but aren’t willing or don’t regularly subject their work to peer review. Here’s a fact we cannot get around: not everyone interested in a given field... Read more
Eddie Kouya drew attention to an article in the Daily Telegraph, about plans to use anti-terrorism legislation against teachers who use the classroom to tell students that same-sex marriage is wrong. I think we need to be careful about over-using the terminology of terrorism, cheapening it in precisely the way some conservative Christians have cheapened the term “persecution,” using it for cases in which someone merely disagrees with them, or even for cases in which all that happened was the loss of... Read more
Paul Levinson has been putting together a really fantastic volume which will be called Touching the Face of the Cosmos. He has shared a provisional list of contributors, and also a podcast of an interview with John Glenn, the transcript of which will appear in the book. I am really excited, not only because my contribution will appear alongside authors like Levinson, Robert J. Sawyer, David Brin, and Guy Consolmagno, but also because my contribution is a short story rather than an... Read more
The quote comes from p. xxiii of Nahum Sarna’s book Understanding Genesis. Read more
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