Ben Witherington shared the cartoon above. One of the challenges in teaching information literacy and fluency skills is that many of the lines that once distinguished experts from others are not merely blurred but invisible in the internet age. Op-eds for the Huffington Post may be written by people with high levels of expertise in the topic they write about, or none at all. Unless you take time to do research about an author, you probably won’t know which. I... Read more
Thanks to IO9 for bringing this Friends-style opening credits for the Doctor Who 50th anniversary episode to my attention! Read more
The official Twitter hashtag for coverage of the Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham debate has been announced by the folks at Geek Goes Rogue. And it is easy to remember, thanks to the great pun. It is #hamonnye 🙂 Our twitter hashtag for the coverage of the Ham/Nye debate will be #hamonnye. Follow along! #atheist #christian #evolution — Jonathan Ryan (@authorjryan) January 15, 2014 Read more
The quote above comes from an article by Derek Penwell challenging the notion that liberals hate the Bible. Here is a slightly longer sample including the quotation above: Liberal Christians aren’t liberal in spite of the Bible, but because of it. They don’t pursue justice for LGBT people because they haven’t read Scripture, but precisely because they have. And in the arc of the narrative of God’s interaction with humanity, liberal Christians find a radical expansiveness, an urgent desire to broaden the... Read more
In a recent conversation on the blog, the common conservative Evangelical conversation point was brought up, which envisages God asking a recently-deceased person “Why should I let you into my heaven?” When asked what his own response to such a question would be, the person who brought it up provided a lengthy speech. While such answers may seem to those providing them to be expressions of the Pauline/Lutheran conviction that salvation is by grace alone, through faith, in fact it... Read more
I remember just a few years ago when the number of scholarly materials on YouTube was minimal. My how that’s changed! Johnny Walker mentioned this lecture by Dale Allison on his blog today: That lecture relates to his book The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus. Below is another lecture, by John P. Meier, on what sort of Jew Jesus was: And of course, there are others that you probably already know about, such as the one from Dale Martin’s... Read more
Enjoy this science literacy parody of the Miley Cyrus song “Wrecking Ball.” Read more
Today I made a spoof post about the upcoming debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye, but there have been a lot of more serious treatments of the subject, including a number here on Patheos blogs. Evangelicals are not necessarily more likely to side with Ken Ham than other Christians. Geek Goes Rogue will be trying to live blog and tweet the debate, and offers a pre-debate interview with Ken Miller. Benjamin Corey explains why he will be rooting against... Read more
A Facebook friend suggested that it would be fun to see the Doctor respond to Ken Ham’s “Were you there?” And so I made the two images in this post. Read more
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