I neglected to embed links to my previous posts about Doctor Who episodes featuring the Great Intelligence, when I wrote my recent posts about “The Snowmen.” And so I thought that I would not only go back and rectify that in those posts, but also offer links here in a separate post to those things that I wrote earlier. The Abominable Snowmen The Web of Fear The Snowmen and More Ideas of God in The Snowmen You can also watch... Read more
You may think that, now that Christmas is over, the war on Christmas will cease to be such a concern for a few months, and people of faith can relax. But it is not so. There is a very serious related issue that Christians dare not neglect: The War on New Year's Day. As I have blogged about before, New Year's Day is a Christian holiday. It commemorates the anniversary of the day on which a Romanian monk miscalculated the... Read more
While I have been blogging about the Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Snowmen,” Indianapolis and central Indiana have been blanketed in a blizzard dumping a foot of snow on the city, and it is still falling, with strong winds. I am very disappointed that some employers have not shown the sort of concern for their employees I would have hoped for. Those that waited until too late to decide to close today put their employees at risk, making them come... Read more
When I blogged about theological themes in the Doctor Who Christmas special, “The Snowmen,” two major concepts of divinity were notably absent: polytheism and Deism. That’s not because such ideas were not touched on in the episode, but because I omitted one of the interesting bits of conversation in the episode, focused on the role of the Doctor himself. On the one hand, Vashtra tries to depict the Doctor in language that could have been pulled straight from Deism, or... Read more
Now that Christmas is over, I can share some music I saved until now, since I had more Christmas music than I could fit in before it would have to wait another year! Dănuţ Mănăstireanu shared a version of this classic piece, sometimes known by the English translation of its title, “Woman of Ireland,” performed by Norwenn Leroy. I wasn't as moved by that rendering as I had been by others in the past, and so I determined to find... Read more
I have long loved this quote from “The Moonbase.” And so given the echoes of the Second Doctor’s adventures, and the theological aspects, in “The Snowmen,” I thought I would share this image plus quote that came my way on Facebook. Even though I am pretty sure he is holding his 100-year diary, with Patrick Troughton holding the book that way, I can’t help but think that the image was chosen because he looks a bit like a preacher holding... Read more
Tonight’s episode of Doctor Who, the long-awaited Christmas special “The Snowmen,” did a wonderful job of preserving the humor, magic, and terror that make Doctor Who more than a science fiction show. SPOILERS AHEAD! The episode begins with a Doctor that is gloomy and withdrawn, having decided to try to avoid becoming attached to anyone as he still carries the scars of what happened to Amy and Rory. And yet the tone is not at all gloomy – on the... Read more
From The New Yorker. Read more
Helen Bond has a new article in The Bible and Interpretation, “Ten Things I Learnt about Jesus by Writing a Book about him.” It offers a nice, balanced overview of some key points related to both the methods and the conclusions of the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus. The book she is referring to is The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed. I have yet to read it, but it sounds like it might be a good textbook for... Read more
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