David Hayward shared a cartoon today depicting the church as a deliberately slow and obstructionist entity: He notes that this is not something that the church is by definition, nor something that it must be. And so I want to take a moment to remember some of the progressive voices in the Christian tradition: the precursors of Christianity, the prophets of ancient Israel who challenged the notion that God belongs to one people (or vice versa), and the ethnocentric and... Read more
Spelling matters. How do you get the archaic contraction “pow'r” right and yet “prostrate” wrong? Let the jokes about whether angels are male begin… From Instagram via Jim West Read more
Here’s another information literacy tutorial song parody video I made. This one focuses on the SMELL Test. The lyrics follow below. Wish Things Were Clear So – so you think you can tell Good sources by SMELL Research from bunk Can you tell a real deal From a fake free lunch A theory from a hunch Do you think you can tell? And did they get you to trade Real experts for kooks Dogmas for degrees Hot air for... Read more
A former student of mine, Rev. Jill Moffett Howard, will be taking a trip to Auschwitz, and will be blogging about her experience. She’ll be traveling with Holocaust survivor Eva Kor, who established the CANDLES Holocaust Museum here in Indiana. The blog is called Touring Auschwitz, and the address is: http://touringauschwitz.wordpress.com/ Read more
In my Sunday school class this weekend we reached chapter 8. It was nice, after so many chapters, to finally reach what the NIV renders as “the point of what we are saying.” Those who may have felt like shouting “Get to the point!” in previous classes presumably felt vindicated. But what is the point of the epistle to the Hebrews? It might seem to be simply that “we have this sort of great high priest.” But digging a little... Read more
In recent years and elections one would have thought that homosexuality and abortion were the new litmus tests of authentic Christianity. Where did this come from? They never were the criteria of proper membership for the first 2000 years, but reflect very recent culture wars instead. And largely from people who think of themselves as “traditionalists”! (The fundamentals were already resolved in the early Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed. Note that none of the core beliefs are about morality at... Read more
Young earth creationists are notorious for two things (among others): a handful of them have obtained a PhD in a relevant scientific domain, doing research the legitimacy of and basis for which they intend to repudiate as soon as they have the letters after their name, with the sole aim of adding legitimacy to the ideology that they adhered to before ever studying science; and they claim that the overwhelming consensus of those who have PhDs in biology, genetics, paleontology,... Read more
Time, Space, and Faith: Religion and Doctor Who John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, 2nd November 2013 Doctor Who is a cultural phenomenon in both the UK and the United States, continuing to go from strength-to-strength as it celebrates its 50th anniversary in November 2013. Over the show’s long history on television—and in various spin-off TV shows, audio adventures, novels and comic books—religion and religious themes have consistently been a subject of interest. From early depictions of Buddhism and pagan... Read more
Kathy Vestal wrote an interesting post with this title at Red Letter Christians. Here is a taste: [W]e forget our place before God. We twist our religion to be about knowledge. We contrive and memorize “facts” about God, dividing ourselves from those who understand differently, making God into our image rather than us in God’s, because our image is all we are humanly capable of understanding. What if we devote our whole life to trying to understand God? Our knowledge... Read more
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