David Hayward posted this cartoon: I find it all the more interesting because it potentially highlights two possible ways of thinking about and approaching church, and Christianity. On the one hand, there is an approach that uses appealing things to lure people into a trap that ultimately results in their spiritual death, as they join a community which exists largely as a pyramid scheme to keep attracting more and more people. On the other hand, there is an approach which... Read more
 This graphic, with its variation on the old “give someone a fish” saying, has been making the rounds on Facebook. It gets at a key aspect of liberal arts education, one that is endangered by those voices that suggest that students need little more than training in job skills. Learning how to pursue a profession in the narrowest sense may not prepare you to confront ethical conundrums, stand up for your rights, or see how systems are unjust, imagine... Read more
If scholarly publications in the English-speaking world can be duped (think the Sokal hoax) into publishing a spoof as a serious article, how much more, one might think, could this happen in Eastern Europe? Now we know, as a group of Serbian academics sokaled (if that isn't a word, it should be) a Romanian periodical. IO9, quoting Retraction Watch which first reported the story, wrote: The paper is replete with transparent gimmicks — obvious, that is, had anyone at the... Read more
The reading for today’s class (in my Religion and Science Fiction class) was from Terminator and Philosophy: I’ll Be Back, Therefore I Am. Artificial intelligence, cyborgs, clones, and transporters all make for great philosophical and religious discussion. But is it even better when couched in lines from Shakespeare? HT SF Signal Read more
Marc Cortez shared the above image in honor of National Punctuation Day, which I had no idea that it was today. But I liked it enough that I thought it was worth passing on. Read more
The image above reached me via Brian LePort on Facebook. I did upgrade recently, but since I hadn’t been using Apple Maps to navigate on the go, I didn’t get to experience its shortcomings – as evidenced by the fact that I am still alive. But I do like the elimination in iOS 7 of the limit on space within folders. What have you noticed about the update that you like?   Read more
The Peanuts cartoon in yesterday’s paper featured Lucy expressing the view that “the theology is the same” for dogs as it is for humans. I’m less interested in the dog-related question at the moment as I am in other non-humans. Is theology the same for extraterrestrial sentient beings? For artificially intelligent machines? These are the kinds of topics my students and I have been talking about in my class on religion and science fiction. But apparently not only sci-fi, but... Read more
The image is from a post on Pete Enns’ blog, in which he explores a common false antithesis between critical scholarly and high-inerrantist-believing views of the Bible. Thinking about the Bible as the box that conservative Christians try to put God into is a helpful way of highlighting why biblicism is a form of idolatry. Read more
Lots of people post pictures and then have a caption contest. But this photo seems to have its own “caption” included. What’s missing is the context. I took the photo of this sign in front of a local church here in Indianapolis. But what does it mean? Rather than try to find out the actual answer, I thought it would be much more fun to post it on my blog and see what possible explanations for the sign blog readers... Read more
HT Scott Bailey Read more
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