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
Stuff Fundies Like and Bruce Gerencser both pointed out this self-description from a fundamentalist church here in Indiana: The thing that struck me most was the incongruity of the name. Does “liberty” really seem to them to best sum up what their church is about? Read more
I had a conversation yesterday with fellow New Testament scholar Holly Hearon, and the conversation found its way to a topic of mutual interest, the intersection between music and our primary fields of research and teaching. I soon found myself persuaded that we need a society that brings together (online at least to begin with, but eventually also in person) people whose interests and work are at the intersection of these two domains. This would include: those who study the... Read more
Karl Barth wrote the above in a letter to his niece, which you can read on the Faith and Theology blog. The creation story deals only with the becoming of all things, and therefore with the revelation of God, which is inaccessible to science as such. The theory of evolution deals with what has become, as it appears to human observation and research and as it invites human interpretation. Thus one’s attitude to the creation story and the theory of... Read more
I went to Starbucks today. The barista asked my name, and then wrote this: Read more
Steve Douglas took some words of mine in a recent post and turned them into an image, and so I’ve shared it above. Read more
I happened across a document reflecting mythicist claims and views recently, and was struck when I noticed where it was hosted. The blog is “Citizen for 9/11 Truth.” It is not a coincidence that fundamentalist Christians often accept conspiracy theories about the government and uncritically accept as “news” things that could be easily debunked with a little research. Once you have accepted the view that you should reject what secular experts have to say, not even when they agree but especially... Read more
The quote comes from Jay Michaelson's recent article in Forward, “How We Know The Bible Was Written By Human(s) Hand.” But the point is that there isn’t really a choice between the traditionalist view and the historical/scholarly ones. The traditionalist view is false. So the real choice is between different ways of being religious: one that admits the truth, and another that denies it in the face of all available evidence. And in this regard, my choice of the former... Read more
As you will gather from the video above, the title of this post indicates not that these two patriarchs live, but that the video is a live performance of Benjamin Britten’s canticle “Abraham and Isaac.” See Bob Macdonald’s blog for another performance, and the text that Britten set here. Of related interest (since the story is one of many that depicts God in a troubling manner), here’s a meme that Jeremy Myers shared: Read more
“Today I Learned” is one of the fascinating elements on Reddit. And today I learned that the costume worn by the bounty hunter Bossk in The Empire Strikes Back was the same sort that appeared in the Doctor Who episode The Tenth Planet: Apparently Doctor Who was using a real-life High-Altitude Windak Pressure Suit made for the British Royal Air Force. It probably wasn’t the exact same outfit in both cases. But clearly out of the two (and the costume made... Read more
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