Today is the birthday of Rudolf Bultmann, a great New Testament scholar and thinker about the Christian faith. As with most great thinkers, he had ideas that have not stood the test of time. But so much of what he proposed is insightful that he is still very much worth reading. Conservatives have probably heard him criticized, and never read him for themselves, and so will not realize how much of every kind of New Testament scholarship and thinking about... Read more
Regular commenter Ian said the following, which made an important point clearly and succinctly, and so I wanted to share it. He wrote: Being shown in detail that you’re wrong is often confused for a personal attack. I have heard so many people, when presented with counter-evidence to their views, complained that the person criticizing their views was committing the ad hominem fallacy. The irony, of course, is that if you attempt to correct their understanding of the term ad... Read more
From PHD Comics. HT Ben Witherington Read more
I saw a news article today about the murder of Narendra Dabholkar in Pune, India. Dabholkar was an activist opposing superstition and blind faith. He was killed, not by a spell or a lightning bolt, but by human beings whose love of superstition of whatever sort did not give them supernatural power. They used technology, and illustrated the dangers in the sorts of irrational ways of thinking that Dabholkar opposed. We see the same sort of dangerous ideology at work... Read more
There are things which, when you are an inerrantist, never cross your mind, and yet when you cease to be one, you wonder how you could possibly have failed to think those thoughts, notice those things, and ask those questions. A case in point: the New Testament authors did not write as though they believed their writings to be inerrant. The case of the Gospel authors who rework and transform the Gospels which went before them is a fairly obvious... Read more
Menachem Wecker has written an article for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s “Vitae” online career hub, on when to decide to leave a job, drop a book project, or otherwise cut one’s losses and move on. Click through to read it. I get quoted in it! Read more
The review I wrote of Is This Not the Carpenter?: The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus (Sheffield: Equinox, 2012) has appeared in Review of Biblical Literature, and can be read for free online. Read more
I spotted someone at GenCon wearing a t-shirt that said: My patronus is a tribble with a sonic screwdriver piloting an X-Wing into Mordor Someone was wearing it, I don’t remember seeing it for sale. But there were a lot of cool ones being sold, and I particularly liked this one, for music geeks: Read more
As we start a new semester, it is important to call to mind bad examples as well as good ones. Do you have a bad feeling about this semester? I'll be teaching my course on religion and science fiction, which made this Star Wars comic seem particularly relevant. Read more
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