I was talking with my pastor today over lunch, and our conversation touched briefly on the subject of questioning God. I remarked that if someone never questions God, they probably have not paid much attention to the Bible or to life, since both lead naturally to such questioning. I recently shared a cartoon about the relative value and effect of questions vs. answers. A commenter then shared a link to a rather long but really wonderful web comic on the... Read more
This is awesome. HT SF Signal. If you are a LOST fan, you will probably laugh out loud, as I did! Read more
Through the poster above, which was shared on Facebook, I had my attention drawn to some comments George Lucas made about Intelligent Design, evolution, God, and the Bible. Click through to read the interview in which he made the comments, if you are interested. He is obviously neither a scientist nor a theologian, but as a filmmaker his vision as it relates to science and religion has been influential, and is thus worth discussing. Thoughts? Read more
Here’s a lengthy but rich excerpt from an article by my late colleague Marshall Gregory: Excerpt from Marshall Gregory, “Liberal Education vs. Professional Training, or, Liberal Education Knows a Hawk From a Handsaw,” CCTE Studies LXIII (September 1998): 1-16. In my view, a skills curriculum is deeply culpable on at least one front in its lessons about life, for a skills curriculum carries the implicit but deeply demoralizing lesson that students in a skills-based curriculum are not worth society’s investment... Read more
In a Facebook group I really love, one member has been doing a fantastic job of exposing the selective literalism of someone who rejects “theistic evolution” and any other form of accommodation to modern science, in the name of the literal truth of the Bible's creation stories. The person in question accused the self-proclaimed literalist of accommodating to theistic heliocentrism. He then went on to counter every claim that such language in the Bible is merely poetic, or reflects the... Read more
Both of these were drawn to my attention by my wife: JAMES (age 4) was listening to a Bible story. His dad read: ‘The man named Lot was warned to take his wife and flee out of the city but his wife looked back and was turned to salt.’ Concerned, James asked: ‘What happened to the flea?’ A Sunday School teacher asked, “Johnny, do you think Noah did a lot of fishing when he was on the Ark? “No,”... Read more
David Hayward’s cartoon above gets it exactly right. Confident assertions often weigh us down and tie us to ways of thinking that often are not as well founded as we initially assumed. Questions raise us up to discover new things that we could never have if we refused to ask them. Even if the questioning leads us to conclude that what we thought initially was correct, we are better for having asked. Read more
Brian Le Port has an interesting post about John the Baptist and related matters. He draws attention to a reference by Justin Martyr to a Jewish group which he refers to as βαπτιστων. The term is used in modern Greek for “Baptists” (as in the Christian denomination). I wonder whether the term most likely denoted to Justin those associated with John the Baptist, or some other or perhaps broader group of immersers – perhaps related to those mentioned later by... Read more
My Sunday school class has transitioned from its study of the Book of Revelation to an broader exploration of the topics raised by the book and in particular its ending. And so we ended up talking about the afterlife in general, and hell in particular, last Sunday. I offered a survey of the development of the doctrine of the afterlife within the Bible. The truth is, there isn't much of a development throughout the Hebrew Bible. There are authors who... Read more
One of the symphonies by one of my favorite composers which I’ve listened to the least often -having listened to it again today, I honestly have no idea why I haven’t listened to it more often. It was apparently uploaded to YouTube recently, and now I’ve shared it here for your listening pleasure! Read more
Select your answer to see how you score.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In