The recent remake of Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law depicts the entire story as taking place on the stage, although it does not always maintain that consistently. It also focuses more attention on religious elements. One could perhaps see a key moment in the trouble for the Karenin household as Alexei Karenin’s statement that Anna breaking her marriage vow as being a crime against God. To make God the one to whom one is responsible for fidelity... Read more
Bob Cargill shared the above image of a Facebook status. And David Hayward did a good job with today’s cartoon, getting at the seeming correspondence between tragedy and increased theological nonsense and inanity (I prefer not to use his term, but some of the things people spout at times like these are so offensive that I understand why one would use it). Read more
A commenter asked where they could find the music from the Doctor Who episode “The Rings of Akhaten.” Above is the first song, “God of Akhaten.” Below is the second, “Wake Up,” with the wonderful speech by the Doctor during it. For discussion of the religious themes of the episode, see my earlier blog review and also my follow-up post comparing the episode with the much earlier episode “The Aztecs.” Read more
Scientific American posted an article on why grad students ought to blog (HT Paul Barford). The article suggests that important skills are learned in the process. As if he had been waiting for that cue, Pat McCullough announced why he blogged, why he stopped, and why he is resurrecting his blog! Read more
In a post about five jobs a creationist cannot do, linguistics was included. Since some might be surprised, I thought I’d comment a bit more on that. Creationists deny linguistics, just as they deny evolution and astronomy and geology, because of an approach to Genesis which they think is literal. In this case, the story in question is the Towel of Babel story in Genesis 11. There too, as in Genesis 1, they are not consistently literalists. I am quite... Read more
A wonderful violin piece, the Preludium and Allegro by Fritz Kreisler, performed by Itzhak Perlman. Kreisler originally claimed the piece was written by the 18th century composer Giulio Gaetano Gerolamo Pugnani (read more about that here). Read more
Here are some mentions of the issue of Jesus’ historicity and related topics from around the blogosphere: Hector Avalos points out that the evidence for Alexander the Great is (not surprisingly to anyone who’s thought about it) more substantial than the evidence for Jesus. In the process, he discusses a number of aspects of how historians address questions, and how that is different than the approach of apologists. A key question I would have liked for him to address, however,... Read more
From Chuck and Beans. HT Marc Cortez Read more
The title and focus of this post is inspired by an article in Patrol magazine by David Sessions. Young people even among Evangelicals have shifted away from the assumptions of many of their parents regarding things like gay marriage. And young-earth creationism, however popular it may seem in some circles now, is unlikely to survive the internet – however much it works as a tool for dissemination of misinformation, it is also making the sheer amount of scientific data and... Read more
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