I am delighted to have good news to share that our local academic library consortium PALNI, the Private Academic Library Network of Indiana, has awarded me a grant to support development of the resource I’ve mentioned previously, the creation of a digital textbook on the Bible and music. This is part of their PALSave initiative, generously funded by the Lilly Endowment. There are so many reasons this has the potential to be something great, but the biggest for me is... Read more
Let me start with a meme that came my way on Facebook and which made me chuckle: Now to the main topic of this post, which is associated with the ascension scene, the feast day for which was yesterday in the Western Christian calendar and is a week later in the Eastern calendar. One verse that gets very little attention is at the start of the Acts of the Apostles, when the disciples ask Jesus about the restoration of the... Read more
It’s an iconic song and arguably one of the most recognizable there is. It is hard to even know what genre to place it in. Yet I never thought about its theology until prompted to do so by a couple of things about the song coming to my attention in close succession, all responding to a video about the making of the song and how it came to be. As this article in Open Culture explains: Byrne developed [the lyrics] as... Read more
Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy – Vol. 4 (2021) – Call for Papers The Day that Coronavirus Stopped the World: What Do We Learn About Pandemics in Science Fiction Stories? We can’t say we weren’t warned. For decades now science fiction authors have been playing around with an enormous variety of pandemic scenarios. While some stories focus on attempts to avert them, many explore their catastrophic consequences, or the plight of victims and survivors in-between, and the ways in... Read more
I love the way the internet makes interesting and genuinely useful connections between things that lead to discoveries we might not have made without this AI assistance. One example from my recent experience is having YouTube introduce me to the Symphony No.1 by Eric DeLamarter. This was recommended to me by YouTube as a new upload to a YouTube channel that I subscribe to because it consistently offers music that I like, introducing me to new music by neglected composers of... Read more
I’ve been thinking a lot about John the Baptist lately (for reasons that are probably obvious to most who know my current research projects). The British Library’s Medieval Manuscripts blog offered an illustrated tutorial on how to be a hermit. They started off with Elijah and then John as one who patterned himself after Elijah. I think that connection is instructive. I don’t envisage Elijah as a recluse. He withdrew when his life was sought by authorities hostile to him. But... Read more
I’ll start this post with another tidbit from my Sunday school class from a while back which I have been meaning to share. That particular Sunday witnessed us being “distracted by Satan.” Yes, I did use precisely that phrase. But it was the subject of Satan that grabbed my attention and that of the rest of the class away from the text that we had been talking about. We certainly weren’t blaming a supernatural force for the fact that we did... Read more
I had a draft post here for a while with something I hoped to return to, comparing how scripturalists/fundamentalists in religion interpret the sacred text, and how “originalists” interpret the Constitution. In the end, since most of those thoughts were from someone else who didn’t give me the OK to share what they wrote, and we never managed to get an article written, I scrapped the idea. But then more recently I had a conversation with someone on Instagram who... Read more
In an amazing blog post on the Yale University Press blog, Agustin Fuentes writes: We all believe. But we are not all religious. Belief is an evolved capacity that incorporates our neurobiology, our behavior, our cultures, our histories, our individual development and experiences. This enables humans to live in the here and now, in the moment, in the material world, and to simultaneously know that there is much more to existence than what we can see, feel, and hear. Belief is the... Read more
I’m exploring creating an open textbook on the Bible and music. One thing that I am excited about by the project is the prospect of having music embedded seamlessly into the textbook so that one can read and listen without having to leave the book. Digital platforms seem to have far more potential to offer innovative reading and learning experiences like this than educators and other authors have yet taken advantage of. There are, to be sure, some websites that... Read more
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