Jedi master Yoda famously said that “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.” He also said, “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.” You may be surprised that I disagree with Yoda, at least to an extent. The approach of the Jedi, I think we have seen more clearly as Star Wars storytelling has continued over recent years, was to go to one extreme in... Read more
Biblical scholar Ekaputra Tupamahu has written an insightful article about whiteness in our field. I will have to take some time to grapple with the implications of specific things he says about the Synoptic problem. Here I want to focus on the broader subject of his article, the “stubborn invisibility of whiteness in biblical scholarship.” Esau McCauley’s Reading While Black has been getting a lot of much-deserved attention. I’ve been seeking to reflect on and incorporate the implications of these considerations into my... Read more
I feel such a sense of deep dismay and disappointment as I scroll on Facebook and see some of the individuals I looked up to as a young born-again Christian not merely showing themselves to be more conservative than I am, but to be completely committed to toeing a partisan political stance and living in a world of utter delusion. For a while I inhabited a world that we shared that envisaged everyday interactions infused with the excitement and intrigue... Read more
CALL FOR PAPERS READY READER ONE: THE STORIES WE TELL ABOUT, WITH, AND AROUND VIDEOGAMES Videogames are a powerful storytelling medium—but what are the stories we tell about videogames, with videogames, around videogames? What can we learn from novels that describe the struggles of young people trapped in virtual reality, from fan fiction that explores the private life of a popular Nintendo character, or from a poem that compares Pac-Man to Saint Augustine? Quite a lot, actually. There is... Read more
There is a moment on the TV show Timeless, in the episode “Mrs. Sherlock Holmes,” in which the presidency of Donald Trump is mentioned: Rufus Carlin : Hey, who’s president? Denise Christopher : Donald Trump. Was that not supposed to happen? Lucy Preston : I don’t know, but it wasn’t us. I’ve been talking about time travel in my class on Religion and Science Fiction this semester, and also thinking about it as I’ve made revisions to the manuscript of my forthcoming book in the Black... Read more
It is important to emphasize that there are a lot of different kinds of Christianity that share in common their unwavering support for Donald Trump and their embrace of a range of falsehoods and conspiracy theories. The ones who claim to be prophets are almost certainly Pentecostals. You won’t hear Baptists or Presbyterians talk like that. Some reflect the broadly Pentecostal brand of Christianity but seem to be working largely independently. Kat Karr predicted that Trump would win by a landslide,... Read more
An interesting upcoming event to be held by the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World: Re-Rolling the Past: Representations and Reinterpretations of Antiquity in Analog and Digital Games Conference organized by Gabriel Mckee (ISAW Library) and Daniela Wolin (Yale University & ISAW Research Affiliate) Registration is required. You will receive the necessary Zoom information under the “Additional Information” section in the confirmation email from Eventbrite. Analog and digital games (e.g. video, role play, board, card, pedagogical, and alternative... Read more
Never in recent history have we had the instinctive communal outbursts of jubilation after an election result was announced that we saw yesterday when it became clear–as official as it could be prior to the electors doing their jobs–that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States and Kamala Harris the next vice president. For some these were their top choice all along. For many who felt deep relief what was paramount was not who won but... Read more
Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote that it makes no sense to hear the sound of fire trucks and pray that it not be your home that is on fire. At that point a home is already burning. What would a prayer that it not be your house mean, especially if that prayer could be answered? That the flames be miraculously relocated to another house, and the memories of the fire department rewritten as the destination to which they are dispatched is... Read more
The phrase “do your research” gets bandied about online a lot. For most people this doesn’t mean the pursuit of advanced degrees, development of advanced skills relevant to a task, or long hours in the lab. What it means instead is Googling something. There have been a number of memes created about this, but they haven’t stemmed the tide of this phenomenon. What is often missed is that people who claim to have “done their research” and ask you to... Read more
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