The next issue of Biblical Archaeology Review will be out in a few days. It includes an article by me about the story of the woman accused of adultery found in John 8 in some manuscripts. I repeatedly found in working in my forthcoming book that asking what Jesus learned from women, both his family and friends and those he only met briefly, unlocked possible meanings in the text that not only I but interpreters in general had missed. I... Read more
Every year around this time Butler University holds a fundraiser. I always do what I can to support it. Why is it worth your time to give to Butler University? In short, I couldn’t do the things that I do that you value were it not for them. The things I share on my blog emerge directly from the kinds of things I read to prepare for classes and to write books and articles. Some of them are inspired directly... Read more
I felt as though my recent class about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, its use in online debates about homosexuality, went better than ever before, and I am eager to reflect on why. I think some of it had to do with my frankness in talking about some of the difficult and disturbing aspects of the stories, which included as a pairing to Genesis 19 the intentionally similar story in Judges 19. We began with an article that is... Read more
It was interesting to see the quick backlash when Rep. Lauren Boebert tweeted that you cannot just rewrite the Constitution. Of course you can, and conservatives like Boebert are constantly emphasizing the 2nd Amendment which of course is by virtue of being an amendment a “rewrite.” But when a text comes to be regarded as sacred, as including a political document, people regard it as sacrosanct even as they live in ignorance and misconceptions regarding what it actually says. One... Read more
If you have ventured to offer any hint of criticism of Donald Trump, or of the Capitol insurrectionists, or Fox News, or anything else that is ideologically similar, you will have heard these sorts of retorts. “What about BLM protests? What about Clinton? What about mainstream media? What about…? What about…?” The rhetoric of Trump-supporting conservatives online has increasingly fallen into predictable patterns, with few if any more frequent and widespread than the use of the logical fallacy tu quoque,... Read more
This isn’t a post about Les Miserables (although I could easily see myself turning my experience in class that the post is about into a parody song). Education has seen significant changes as we have adapted to the pandemic, and reflecting on the moments when things unfold very differently as a result is an important step towards evaluating what we’ve learned through these times and what we need to make sure we don’t forget if things ever get “back to... Read more
I make the point regularly that there is no such thing as “the Bible.” The Jewish Bible and Protestant Old Testament may contain the same books, but they are categorized differently, translated differently, and approached through different frames of reference. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles are different from Protestant ones, and once again the assumptions of readers tend to be too. There are, at best, many Bibles, and the use of the singular as though it denoted a universally agreed upon... Read more
I’ve been rewatching the original series of Star Trek and as always have been taking notes on points I might return to in blog posts or other contexts, in particular things related to religion. My memories of the episode “A Piece of the Action” were largely the existence of a society patterned on Chicago’s mob wars in the 1920s. I had, however, not remembered how that society came to have those characteristics. There is a direct relevance to religion, and... Read more
After I shared Jana Riess’ great article about Kristin Swenson’s recent book A Most Peculiar Book: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible, it became clear to me that I don’t always talk with my family or my Sunday school class about things that I now take for granted and that seem obvious to me, common knowledge about the Bible. Or if I have mentioned them, I may have done so once, in passing, and not provided an opportunity to explore them... Read more
I just watched the movie News of the World starring Tom Hanks. It was comments and thoughts about the film from my wife, an American citizen who spent most of her life in Romania, that helped me to realize how much the history of colonization, settlement, and the “Wild West” is key to understanding the culture of the United States right down to today. Even those of us whose European ancestors came well after that time, we joined ourselves to... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In