Several things came to my attention so that I decided to bring them together in a blog post. I have to start with an interactive choose your own adventure online learning site that leads you through a shiur (Talmudic learning session) that explores the question of whether a robot can be a person from the perspective of the Jewish tradition, discussing Torah, rabbinic literature, the golem traditions, and much else. Next is a post about playing Settlers of Catan through... Read more
There is a famous story about how Martin Luther King persuaded Nichelle Nichols to stay on Star Trek. One of the things he said was that if she left, they’d likely replace her character Lt. Uhura with a blonde white woman. It turns out that one comic book series did that anyway. I ought to have known this. At some point I did in fact know it. But at the time it must have seemed merely strange, in a comic... Read more
I wrote back in 2006 that I found an article published in the New York Times, “For Evangelicals, Supporting Israel Is ‘God’s Foreign Policy’,” deeply disturbing. The same views continue to be widely held and so it seems worth revisiting this topic. It is not that I think supporting Israel is in itself a bad thing – far from it. But the combination of a number of specific features of American right-wing fundamentalist Christians’ support of Israel I find problematic as a... Read more
Having finally wrapped up work on some other projects, including wrapping up loose ends and what are hopefully the final revisions to those book manuscripts and chapters, I am excited to have turned my attention to really getting to work in a focused way on my open textbook (or as I prefer to call it, open text+musicbook) on the Bible and Music. I start, as the class I teach also does, with music behind and in the Bible, before focusing... Read more
I’m still trying to figure out how Trump supporters make logical sense of his claims about election fraud. In the period before the 2016 election Trump claimed that the system was rigged against him. He won anyway. Now when he has the presidency and ran for re-election he made the same claims in the period before the 2020 election, but while the attempt to steal the election didn’t work when he wasn’t in office, he was powerless to stop it... Read more
I know I’ve felt that dreams I’ve had in the past have conveyed other kinds of insights before. But I think a dream I had recently may be the first that I felt I learned something from about a contemporary ethical debate. In the dream I was a person who owned a boat. In real life, I’ve never owned a boat and have rarely been on one. In the dream, someone approached me to transport something for them, essentially to... Read more
When you read 1984 you may have thought the notion of “doublethink” was an exaggeration. If you are watching the news in the United States lately you will know this is not the case. While there have been plenty of examples (such as the “pro-life” support for war and lack of concern for the well-being of the living, or the use of “religious freedom” to refer to the freedom to impose one’s views on employees or society as a whole) one... Read more
It has seemed unnecessary to me for the passive voice to be avoided when writing. Until recently, that is, when one of the implications of this way of writing was drawn to my attention. In reading student assignments about the Islamic Middle East, I was struck by the way more than one student talked about how men and women “were viewed” in particular historical and cultural contexts. I noticed as never before how this linguistic maneuver allowed the involvement of... Read more
Since I write about ancient and modern religious debates with such frequency, I expect some will assume based on the title that this post will be about something along those lines. It isn’t, although those controversies aren’t entirely unrelated to the relevance of my focus here, which is on the decision of yet another university (this time the University of Vermont) to eliminate its religion program along with a number of others, ceasing to offer majors and minors that are... Read more
We tend to focus, when thinking about doctrines of afterlife and eternal punishment, about what is or isn’t fair to the one punished. We rarely if ever take time to reflect on the ramifications of such doctrines for those who presumably won’t be subjected to the torments of hell–humans, but also God. I heard a sermon many years ago, the ideas in which were not new then and continue to circulate or be thought of since. The sermon began with... Read more
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