Do you need a PhD to understand the Bible? Short answer: yes. But a longer answer is called for. And the longer answer includes the fact that you need more than one PhD to understand the Bible. When I say you need a PhD, I don’t necessarily mean that you yourself need to earn a PhD, much less several. But you will need multiple people with PhDs involved in the process. You will not understand the entire Bible without people... Read more
I came across this image today on Reddit: It poses two axes, knowledge and belief. But one of them strikes me as peculiar. Why is the one that runs from left to right categorized as having to do with “belief”? It seems to me that a graphic that explores religious and non-religious options, and the relative sense of certainty adherents to them have, could be useful. The “knowledge” axis is clearly about confidence in one’s views and not “knowledge.” And... Read more
After a couple of years of practice typing on an iPad, I still find that (at least when I am typing without looking at the keyboard) my name ends up coming out more frequently as Ja,es than James. Presumably this is due to the slight difference in size between the iPad’s on-screen keyboard and a typical physical computer keyboard. Has anyone else noticed this sort of thing? Can one retrain one’s mind and muscles to type more effectively on a... Read more
I recently finally got around to watching Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, a prequel to the rebooted Battlestar Galactica series, but one set in between it and the still earlier Caprica. I appreciated its exploration of the zeal of a young Bill Adama, who was eager to kill as many of the enemy as he could, inspired by the stories of other heroes in the war. As the story progresses, Adama learns that much of what he has heard is... Read more
Thanks to Mark Goodacre and Matthew Montonini for sharing the above video, featuring New Testament scholar George Caird and also David Flusser being interviewed for the 1977 documentary, “Who Was Jesus?” Read more
This is the latest cartoon from David Hayward. Words are boxes. The great mystics and theologians of most religious traditions have always sooner or later reached the point of treating language not as a box to encompass and describe the divine, but as mere boxes used to point towards a reality that they cannot ever do justice to. Pictures and images are also boxes, of course, and David’s cartoon is likewise not seeking to capture, but to point beyond itself... Read more
Inspired by (and not to be outdone by) my recent effort to convey information literacy skills in song, my colleague Chad Bauman has written and recorded a song of his own. It is focused on the CRAP test, which is a mnemonic device for remembering key things to look for when evaluating sources. Have a listen – I think you'll get a kick out of it! And then please share it with librarians, teachers, and students that you know. Read more
An e-mail this morning from Digital Commons informed me about audio recordings of guest lectures at Asbury Theological Seminary which have been made available via their digital repository. Not all of them will be of interest to everyone, but some look like they are real gems (I haven’t listened to any yet), such as James D. G. Dunn on “The Excitement of New Testament Studies” or Gordon Wenham on “The Gap Between Law and Ethics in the Old Testament” or... Read more
There has been a lot of speculation, and many rumors, related to the next Doctor after Matt Smith. But today I find myself wondering whether there will be another Doctor. I wonder whether the BBC is not planning on ending the show’s run. Trenzalore, we have learned, is the place where the Doctor dies and is entombed, the place of “the fall of the Eleventh.” The latter could be a clever misdirection, referring to an eleventh legion, his moral fall,... Read more
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