This came my way via Kara Cooney on Facebook, who also shared this gem (presumably depicting a scene connected with the audiobook The Eye of the Scorpion): Read more
The Doctor Who episode “The Caretaker” has more than one possible meaning, presumably intentionally. The Doctor goes undercover at the school where Clara teaches, as a “caretaker” or custodian. But what he is actually doing there is “taking care” of Earth, seeking to find and remove a deadly robot. But the episode begins with Clara running back and forth between her life with the Doctor and her life with Danny. And so we actually multiple other instances of caretaking – the Doctor... Read more
A post on the blog Internet Monk recently explored the idea of a different sort of “creation museum,” one that accurately depicts the natural world (unlike the Creation Museum in Kentucky), and takes its inspiration more from the end of Job than the beginning of Genesis. The ending of Job depicts God as pointing to creation, not as a challenge to get the details right, much less a command to reject what others think about its age, but as an experience that should instill awe... Read more
The image above was inspired by a real-life experience I had today. I was walking down the hallway, and a colleague, a Classics professor, was walking slowly in the same direction I was headed, looking down, arms in that tell-tale position. And so I walked up behind him and said jokingly, “Stop texting and walking. Be a better example!” He turned around, and was holding a book. That’s real “texting” while walking. And I thought it was meme-worthy. Unfortunately I didn’t catch the... Read more
Scholarship involves the building of consensus and the challenging of thereof, and so it is easy to find oneself confused about when a view is merely a minority or even a fringe scholarly viewpoint, and when it has crossed the line into pseudoscholarship. And so I thought this comment by Paul Regnier deserved to be highlighted in a post: What defines a theory as pseudoscholarship is not that it goes against the consensus. Pseudoscholarship tends to Denigrate entire scholarly fields... Read more
For the Jewish New Year, I thought it would be appropriate to finally share a couple of articles related to Doctor Who and Judaism that came to my attention over the past week. First, Rabbi Pamela Gottfried wrote a piece for the site My Jewish Learning, with the title “Taking the TARDIS to God.” Although not a Whovian herself, the TARDIS seemed to her to play a similar role for Whovians that prayer plays for her. Before one dismisses the comparison, reflect on the... Read more
Simon Joseph, author of The Nonviolent Messiah: Jesus, Q, and the Enochic Tradition, has offered a response to the recent articulation by Dale Martin of the view that Jesus and his followers may have been armed in the garden of Gethsemane. It promises to be the first of a series of posts on this subject. Brian Pound has the first part of his response to Martin in a guest post on the Jesus Blog. Dustin Smith posted on how Jewish readers... Read more
I remember the powerful ending of the movie The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, in which she is confronted with questions about why she interpreted the finding of a sword in a field the way she did. That it was lost in a sword fight, or even that some passerby decided to discard it at random, are options that she never considered. Interpreting it as a sign from God, other simpler possibilities were simply ignored. Here’s the clip: Mythicism is... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In