Mark Goodacre pointed out that the CNN documentary Finding Jesus now has a trailer video. There is apparently also a book forthcoming that was written in conjunction with the series: Finding Jesus: Faith. Fact. Forgery: Six Holy Objects That Tell the Remarkable Story of the Gospels by David Gibson and Michael McKinley. Read more
From the New Yorker. HT Hemant Mehta. Read more
This episode has Ben claiming that he is the last person to have been born on the island, and the only one who has seen Jacob, the man to whom he answers. Ben says that Jacob is not a man you go and see – he is a man who summons you. Locke thinks Ben is lying, and suggests that Ben is “the man behind the curtain.” Ben takes Locke to a vabin, around which there is a circle of... Read more
One of the best questions I was asked after my recent talk about the Mandaeans was from a music professor, who asked whether the Mandaeans have a distinctive musical tradition. I did not know the answer, and still do not, but the question is an important one, and I hope that some musicologist might one day soon investigate the topic, since as far as I know, no one has done so thus far. Read more
We learn that the Others have been eagerly awaiting Locke’s arrival among them. Ben tells Locke that Locke brought his father to the island. Ben tells Locke that he isn’t ready to join the Others, because he is still bound by the person he was before he came to the island. Everyone needs to make a gesture of breaking with their past, and in his case, he will have to kill his father. They are keeping Anthony Cooper tied to... Read more
Donna Yates recently offered this challenge to other academics, and I wanted to share it, since it gets at the heart of what it means to be an academic who blogs, or has a Twitter account, or who is otherwise active on social media: So, dear reader, I challenge you to evaluate your normal routine. Think about the information you collect on a daily basis, think about the stuff you aggregate for yourself, and think about the data artefacts that... Read more
In a flashback, a woman on a bench claims that Jin is not just the son of a fisherman, but the son of a prostitute, and asks for money from Sun to keep the secret. Sun finds Mr. Kwon, Jin’s father. He tells her that Jin’s mother was with many men, and left him with the baby. He tells Sun not to tell Jin that she met him, or that his mother is still alive. Sun asks her father for... Read more
It is interesting that an atheist could apparently see that the theology on the t-shirt on the left above is idiotic, while the conservative American Christian who made it, and those who wear it, apparently could not. Someone did their own version, making the t-shirt on the right above, which they shared on imgur. But the truth is that the evidence supports the view that, if there are gods of the sort that traditional theists and polytheists posit, their power is... Read more
Desmond sees a flash which involves not just Charlie’s death, but also someone coming to the island. He thinks it will be Penny, and so this time he wants the future that he has glimpsed to come about. Desmond takes Charlie, Hurley, and Jin “camping.” Then they hear a helicopter, and see someone “eject” from it. They go into the jungle and find a bag with a satellite phone in it and the novel Catch-22 In Portugese in it, with... Read more
The blog Only a Game had a wonderful post recently about the issue with Wikipedia, which is not about the information that is in many of the articles, but about what can be known to be behind them, and thus the confidence that one should or should not place in them. Here is a quote: The Wikipedia knows nothing, or rather, someone using the Wikipedia cannot know anything from that alone. Whoever refers to a topic on the Wikipedia cannot be said to possess... Read more
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