I got a kick out of this Communist version of Monopoly. But I also recommend a serious read of the Open Culture article about the anti-monopoly message of the original precursor of the modern board game we know as Monopoly. Then for another bit of amusement, check out this Trojan War edition of Monopoly: Read more
The above video came to my attention via Progressive Christianity. It features actor Rainn Wilson, known to many as Dwight Schrute from The Office. Wilson is a Baha’i. If you came here looking for more academic videos, then I should add that various recordings from the last American Academy of Religion conference are now online. Read more
The above cartoon came to my attention via Facebook. I actually had a very interesting discussion about religion and violence in my “Speaking About Religion” class yesterday. We discussed the Chapel Hill incident as well as the one in Copenhagen. We did some Googling to see what the internet had to say about which ideology was responsible for the most deaths, among Christianity, Islam, and atheism. And we talked about why such attempts at counting and comparing are probably unhelpful, and... Read more
Apparently the Martin Luther Playmobil toy is their fastest selling toy ever. I can’t seem to figure out where to buy one in the United States… Read more
A pdf of my article on “Monotheism,” published in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Ethics, is available on my Selected Works page. I am grateful to Oxford University Press for the permission to make the article available there. Read more
The quote comes from the post “Correction” which appeared here on February 13th. Read more
Daniel Gulotta recently posted on his blog about the need to take Richard Carrier seriously. I agree, and have begun engaging his book in what promises to be a lengthy and detailed series. I knew from the outset that if I didn’t do that, mythicists would complain that I was simply painting with a broad brush and not doing justice to the details, and that if I did do that, they would complain that I was dealing with preliminaries and... Read more
Although this isn’t a case of “two great tastes that taste great together,” I’ve suggested before that “apologist” and “scholar” are not an absolute dichotomy, but a spectrum. I think that point is relevant to the discussion that has exploded in the blogosphere, with Nijay Gupta, Mike Bird, Anthony Le Donne, Jonathan Bernier, Very Rarely Stable, and Gavin Rumney (twice), responding or reacting to a letter to the editor by Paul Holloway, in which he calls Wright a “book-a-year apologist” rather... Read more
I thought this image from Mrs. Betty Bowers made a good point cleverly. Read more
I asked my students directly about the strange citations and citation formatting in their work, and one volunteered a possible explanation – the website Easybib.com. Now, I tried it out and it did a pretty OK job creating a citation for a post on my blog. And so the issue seems to still be what students are entering, and then the fact that they are copying the results generated automatically by the website without understanding them or being able to evaluate... Read more
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