A rock opera about the nativity. Click the videos below to watch it on YouTube. Read more
A rock opera about the nativity. Click the videos below to watch it on YouTube. Read more
A federal judge struck down Indiana’s ban on same-sex marriages yesterday. Fred Clark shared this useful map illustrating the impact that this is having on traditional heterosexual marriage in the United States: Meanwhile, Jeff Carter continued his series of Biblical limericks with one about even more traditional marriage, of a sort that is no longer legal in the United States. Read more
Paul Regnier made a bingo game to help students spot parallels between Jesus and Neo in The Matrix. I’ve included the bingo card at the end of the post below. Lots of studies have been done which indicate both the recycling of story motifs across literature and film, and also the tendency of historical figures to be conformed to type over time. Although a close analysis of literature needs to go deeper than the mere spotting of parallels, students absolutely... Read more
The above image comes from EvolutionEvidence.org, which has a whole page dedicated to intermediate fossils and the evidence they provide for biological evolution. Read more
The aria above is from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s opera Die Tote Stadt. Korngold is one of my favorite composers, and so I’ve been looking for songs of his to learn. You will most often hear this sung nowadays by sopranos, such as Renee Fleming. But in the opera it is a duet, and it works well as a tenor solo too, and so I am glad that someone put this historic recording of tenor Joseph Schmidt singing the piece on... Read more
Loren Rosson has reviewed two books which offer two different mythicist theories – one in relation to Muhammad, one in relation to Jesus. The former is Robert Spencer’s Did Muhammad Exist?: An Inquiry into Islam’s Obscure Origins, and the latter is Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. On the one that interests me more (although both interest me), Rosson seems to me to make great efforts to be not only fair but... Read more
I met a member of the band The Dead Squirrels recently. When he told me the name of his band, I misheard it and thought he said “The Dead Scrolls” and so I asked, “As in the Dead Sea Scrolls?” When I realized my mistake, I explained what line of work I am in. Professional hazard, I guess. Read more
Obviously it depends what one means by a “god.” If the universe is divine, then it obviously brings us into being and also brings our lives to an end, in one sense. It is interesting that one finds in the Bible both the view that people need not defend their gods – if Ba’al is a god, let him defend himself (Judges 6), but also admonitions to fight on behalf of one’s own deity. And so there is a parallel... Read more
Have a listen to the piece above, which I lamented on a previous occasion is not easy to find. It is the piano concerto by Ilmari Hannikainen. I love it when people upload hard to find music to YouTube! This is a really enjoyable piano concerto of the Romantic era, and it deserves to be better known than it is. The person who shared it has shared a number of other neglected piano concertos of that era in their YouTube... Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
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