Let me start by saying that Jesus was not born in a manager. I had that spelling error on an exam this semester. For that to have happened might have looked something like this: Assuming, of course, that the father in the picture was some sort of manager. But even if you get the spelling right, and write manger, Jesus still wasn’t born in one, even if the story in the Gospel of Luke was literally true. A manger is a feeding... Read more
I don’t think the values of the thirty-something evangelicals have gone away. I think they have gone silent over and against the VERY vocal Boomer evangelicals of these last days. I suspect the election results in part support this hypothesis. Boomer conservatives were shocked to lose the election because they had been so vocal and convinced the silent were on their side. Instead, to some extent, they had apparently created a climate where differing voices felt it was better to... Read more
Someone mentioned an “N. T. Wright” meme, and while they meant a quote from him superimposed on a photo of him teaching, I confess that the first thing that popped into my head when I saw the title of the post looked more like this: As you think about theologians you’d like to see on trading cards, and mention them on my earlier post as entries in the Theologian Trading Cards giveaway, why not think about quotes from them you’d... Read more
Another modern classic, shared lest Cthulhu feel neglected this holiday season… Read more
Next semester my freshman course “Faith, Doubt, and Reason” focuses on “The Quest for Community” and in particular on utopias and dystopias. We read a range of works, from the real to the fiction and from the ancient to the modern – including a significant dose of science fiction. Science fiction provides a great way (although by no means the only way) of taking seriously what our allegedly ideal society would look like, extrapolating along the trajectory into the future... Read more
Via Ancient World Online, I learned of an enormous horde of doctoral and masters theses that have been made available online, on topics including the Bible, ancient Judaism, Roman religion, Patristics, and much else. There are too many to make it seem worth listing them all here (click through to AWOL for a list of them). But I will mention that one of them is that of a biblioblogger, namely Ben Blackwell. Read more
I was grading final exams from my class on the Bible this evening, and a student’s comment made me chuckle. I focus in this course on information literacy skills, i.e. the identification of reliable sources of information online. One student found a reputable scholar’s academic web site hosted at their university. I won’t say which scholar to protect the guilty, but here is what the student wrote about it: I won’t lie, due to the set-up of the webpage, I... Read more
The latest trailer for this year’s Doctor Who Christmas special, from the BBC. HT IO9 Read more
This image was shared with me this morning by e-mail: Perhaps it is a professional hazard (as I have blogged about God and Santa more than once in the past), but I found myself not just enjoying the face value humor of it, but also reflecting on how this relates to ancient (including Biblical) and modern ideas of God. The idea prevailed in antiquity that one or more gods must be appeased through good behavior, or can be offended by... Read more
April De Conick shared the above video on her blog, in which she discusses her research with the president of Rice University. If you listen to only a snippet, I’d recommend the one where she talks about the advice she received from Jarl Fossum about searching for the origins and early history of a tradition through later sources. It runs from 8:38-9:03. And then please do discuss it! Read more
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