Via a review of Elaine Pagels’ latest book, Revelations, in The New Yorker, I learned of a Prada perfume commercial featuring text from one of the Gnostic works found at Nag Hammadi, “Thunder, Perfect Mind.” Here’s the video: I truly wonder what the ancient author and early readers of the text would make of its use in a video such as this one – with jazz playing in the background. There is an online article looking at this instance as... Read more
Today’s round-up on the Talpiot tombs and the “Jesus discovery”: James Tabor posted on his blog on the subject of whether the fish might be something else, and whether there is in addition to the fish a man in its mouth. Mark Goodacre continues a theme he began back when the Talpiot Tomb subject came to focus a few years ago, an analogy with the Beatles – asking whether any of the names in the tombs is the equivalent of... Read more
I learned via Jerry Coyne’s blog that Susannah Cornwall (a theoblogger and biblioblogger) had made an argument for gender equality in ministry by pointing out that we do not know whether Jesus was biologically male. This led to the Telegraph picking up the story, as well as some negative responses which largely missed the point. Do we know that Jesus was genetically, chromosomally, biologically male? No. We don’t know with respect to most people we encounter today whether they suffer from Klinefelter syndrome... Read more
I’ve gotten quite a number of visitors today from the Richard Dawkins Foundation web site, via a repost there of my recent blog entry about Miley Cyrus, and her tweet of a paraphrase of something Laurence Krauss said. The byline of the repost there says “James McGrath – Friendly Atheist.” I’m not sure whether someone has mistaken me for Hemant Mehta, or felt the need to indicate that the post was written by me without him (construing the dash as... Read more
Happy International Women’s Day! And a tip for any American reader married to a Romanian woman: you don’t want to forget to wish your wife a happy International Women’s Day today and give her flowers. Especially if you forgot to give her a mărţişor on the 1st or March! Read more
The iPad 3 has been mentioned on surprisingly few blogs I read regularly or subscribe to. When the iPad 2 came out, there was more buzz among educators. Perhaps it is simply the fact that whether educators could afford to upgrade to iPad 2 (or use university funds to get one), or could not afford to upgrade to the then new, now old iPad 2, none of us can afford to get an iPad 3. But presumably if we felt... Read more
HT Kevin Edgecomb Even though my musical tastes generally gravitate towards the late Romantic era, for some reason I also really love some much older music. If you enjoy Thomas Tallis, for instance, you will probably enjoy this Byzantine chant. I love the fact that the performers, Cappella Romana, have the sheet music for this piece and others they’ve recorded on their web site, in both Byzantine and standard notation, no less! Read more
Several things have converged on a similar theme. First, Jonathan Robinson shared a post by Richard Beck, and added this cartoon: But in fact, the point of the post was more in line with this image which my sister sent to me. It has some coarse language, sorry, but the point seemed worthwhile enough when combined with a sense of sibling obligation that I thought I’d share it. And both of those reminded me of this cartoon: It obviously takes... Read more
I was struck when a friend on Facebook shared this video, which explains how the currently popular “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster was rediscovered in Barter Books, a bookstore that I used to love to visit when I lived in the Northeast of England. Read more
Via Joel Watts. It might not take more than a challenge to a state law prohibiting gay marriage, from a member of the clergy in a denomination that allows gay marriage, saying that the state is prohibiting them from freely exercising their religion, to really bring this aspect of the matter to everyone’s attention – and perhaps get it resolved at the level of the supreme court. Read more
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