Another gem from TheologyGrams! Read more
Another gem from TheologyGrams! Read more
This cartoon by David Hayward reminded me of the carnival games which, if you didn’t know it already, tend to be rigged, or at the very least are much more difficult to win than you are led to believe. Religions and their adherents often take advantage of the fact that knowledge about God is elusive, and a sense of connection with God fleeting, prizes that may consistently seem just out of reach. And so they hold up a target and... Read more
Eddie Arthur shared a wonderful set of excerpts from the Not So Unpleasant Version of the Bible, shared by Archdruid Eileen. Here is the text of that post: It was Snargent who originally started it. He complained about the Crucifix in the Chapel of Contemplation – said that the depiction of an execution was quite unseemly for a religious group. And that was nothing to when I pointed out that it was based on the accounts in the Gospels. The... Read more
I really enjoyed the music in the first episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. And so I of course wanted to know who it was by and where I could listen to it again. I soon discovered that it was the work of Alan Silvestri, known for his soundtracks for a very large number of movies. The video above has the first track of the soundtrack. Read more
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Dustin Smith, of the blog Dustin Martyr, to discuss my attempts to tie together the strands of John’s Christology – and to figure out whether tying them together is an effort to figure out what the author of the Fourth Gospel thought, or to systematize something that author did not. Click through to read the first installment of that interview, which Dustin has posted on his blog. Read more
The rebooted series Cosmos, featuring Neil de Grasse Tyson, has sparked a lot of discussion about religion as well as science. I finally managed to watch the first episode while eating my lunch today. The message of the series Cosmos? Surely a major component is that we cannot explore our place is the universe without imagination. Yes, science provides data which only fools and dogmatists ignore to their shame. But to turn data into a worldview, we need imagination (a... Read more
The quote comes from a guest post on Pete Enns’ blog, in which Randy Hardman tells the story of why he left the pursuit of apologetics as a vocation. Read more
I was thinking recently that it would be fun to teach a class, whether about the Bible or history more generally, which approached it through stories about time travel to various times and places, and then looked at the actual historical sources. A few recent posts on blogs I read intersected with this, bringing the Bible and/or Christianity into intersection with time travel. First, here’s an excerpt from a post by Arik Bjorn at Faith Forward: With 20 centuries under... Read more
The above cartoon from David Hayward makes a wonderful point. And I love how different ideas about truth, including ultimate truth, can be substituted to bring the point home in specific contexts. Reality is stronger than you. Reality can handle your questions. God is stronger than you. God can handle your questions. But the clincher for this to work in practice is this: it is crucial to love truth more than creeds, worldviews, and beliefs. If the world is revealed... Read more
Students are regularly confused because “J” is the abbreviation for the Yahwist source, resulting from the spelling in German and the fact that the Documentary Hypothesis originated in German-language scholarship. And so that, differences in spelling, pronunciation of letters, and the challenges many have when they need to pronounce Biblical names and words, all seem connected to this cartoon. Read more
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