“Garden of Eden to become Iraqi National Park.” That’s the headline in New Scientist. The article is about the preservation of a part of the southern marshlands of Iraq, the region where the Ma’dan Marsh Arabs have historically lived, and a traditional homeland of the Mandaeans. Local lore also claims it was the site of the Garden of Eden. There is a movie Gwendolen Cates is working on, “Mourning in the Garden of Eden,” which looks at religious minorities in that region, including... Read more
If I’ve seemed surprisingly quiet over the past couple of days, it is because I decided that I ought to finally respond to Apple’s notifications that there was an update available for iOS, the iPad operating system. I backed up my iPad, then let it do its thing. As has happened on the last several occasions when I’ve upgraded, it ended up stuck in “Recovery Mode” and could not simply be upgraded and used, but needed to have contents and... Read more
Many readers will already be aware of the University of Durham E-Theses repository, where digital copies of dissertations are made available. But there is also a larger institutional repository, Durham Research Online, which allows one to search and find not only theses but also articles and other materials written and published by Durham academics. Visit http://dro.dur.ac.uk/ and take a look. And if you are local to Durham, you may also be interested in the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibit! Read more
HT Robin Parry Read more
Rachel Held Evans blogged about millennials and the future of Christianity, getting lots of reactions. David Hayward responded with this cartoon: Kevin Davis, Hemant Mehta, Andii Bowsher, and Allan Bevere also discussed the topic. John Hawthorne shared developing hypotheses about Mainlines and Evangelicals, while Martin Marty reconsiders the mainline legacy. Chris Henrichsen posted “Another Liberal at Church!” while Dwight Welch blogged about religious symbols. Christian Piatt blogged about ministers losing their faith. There is a video with John Shelby Spong talking... Read more
Matthew Morgenstern shared this on Facebook: Read more
A recent Frazz comic strip. HT Phil Plait Read more
David French blogged about the Presbyterian Church USA removing the hymn “In Christ Alone” from its hymnal, because its authors refused a proposed change to the lyrics that did away with the notion of Christ’s death as satisfying God’s justice. It isn’t often that I agree with French, but I do when he writes: The importance of rejecting substitutionary atonement is tough to overstate, with ramifications across the full spectrum of spiritual, social, and cultural engagement. Of course, he views... Read more
Jeremy Smith came across a sticker that took a phrase from Star Wars in what was intended to be an atheistic direction: In Star Wars: A New Hope, Darth Vader says “I find your lack of faith disturbing” to a skeptic of the Force. Jeremy Smith finds a more positive interpretation of the phrase: religious faith should disturb us, make us uncomfortable, including (perhaps especially) the person whose faith it is. But even taken in its originally-intended sense as an expression of... Read more
Image by Dan4th. HT vjack I emphasize information literacy a lot here on my blog, and even more so in classes that I teach. Learning to not just click “share” or “like” without fact-checking, looking up the source of a quotation, and so on, is a key part of this. I like the way this image substitutes a request for a citation in the place where one often finds a slogan or quotation whose basis is at best unclear. Read more
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