On a long drive, I had the opportunity to have a conversation with my wife and our niece, Dana, about homosexuality from a Christian perspective. In the discussion, a few points came up related to the interpretation of Genesis 2 that I want to share. On the one hand, many have asked why, if homosexuality is perfectly acceptable, we are given a story about God creating a man and a woman. I think the answer is pretty simple: the narrative... Read more
A short piece for violin by another Latvian composer with the surname Kalniņš. Posted with Blogsy Read more
On Facebook, Karl Giberson shared a link to a blog post with statistics about retention in religious and areligious groups, i.e. their effectiveness in passing on their worldview and communal identity to their children. Here is the relevant chart: There is a lot that is interesting and potentially worth talking about. I suspect that for some of the lower-ranked denominations, it may be that their dwindling numbers make it challenging to retain any sense of community. The lack of much... Read more
This past Sunday in my Sunday school class, we discussed the message addressed to the church in Philadelphia in Revelation chapter 3. There are a number of interesting details, but in this post I want to highlight one of them. In Revelation 3:10, the author places this promise to the church in Philadelphia on the lips of Jesus: Since you have kept my command to endure patiently, I will also keep you from the hour of trial that is going... Read more
There are several posts around the blogosphere related to topics of conversation here, some of which interact directly with things I’ve written. First, Fred Clark offers a helpful response to the “anatomically-correct porpoise fetish” objection to the sufficiency of the Golden Rule as a moral principle. The key is to understand it not in a legalistic fashion – which of course is antithetical to the whole spirit of the principle !- but as inviting us not merely to inflict on... Read more
The above is another provocative cartoon by David Hayward. On the same topic, see Liberal Baptist Rev’s “Goofed-Up Bible” version of John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Bible. And because the Bible was clear, humankind was saved from endless debates about what God expected. “ Read more
A nice little piece by Imants Kalniņš, a living Latvian composer who has written in a range of styles from symphonies to rock opera! Read more
Someone on Facebook mentioned, as part of an argument against same-sex marriage, a passage in Maimonides saying that the ancient Egyptians would marry a man to a man and a woman to a woman. To me, this seemed to provide still more support for an argument in the precise opposite direction. Maimonides was in fact drawing from the earlier Sifra, the famous commentary on Leviticus. The gist of the entire discussion in both sources is that same-sex relations between women... Read more
I just posted another draft of a chapter from the Mandaean Book of John. In this chapter, chapter 76, there are a few places where the meaning of the text is not entirely clear (do I need to mention this when it is true of pretty much every section of every Mandaic text?). But the gist is that Anush-Uthra did works in Jerusalem that Christians claim Jesus did. This is blatantly polemical, and so it would obviously be a mistake... Read more
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