Beth Mardutho Fellowships in the Syriac Digital Humanities and Syriac Language Courses 2020

Last updated on: December 31, 2019 at 9:26 am By James F. McGrath

Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute [www.bethmardutho.org] announces six Digital Humanities Fellowships and two Syriac language courses to be offered in the summer of 2020. Digital Humanities Fellowships The Institute invites graduate students and recent graduates to apply for Digital Humanities Fellowships. The successful candidates will have the opportunity to work on the Institute’s projects including the newly launched Simtho Syriac Thesaurus [simtho.bethmardutho.org] including computational tagging of texts, the Syriac Electronic-Data Research Archive [sedra.bethmardutho.org], the Qoruyo project for developing models... Read more

Ad Astra

Last updated on: December 31, 2019 at 9:49 am By James F. McGrath

For the early part of the movie Ad Astra, I felt like it was stunning visuals in search of a story. By the end, I realized that the first part of the movie and its overall feel and pacing are central to its message. It was helpful that, immediately after finishing watching it, I saw that Paul Levinson reviewed the movie as well on his blog. He describes it as the 2001 of the 21st century. I think that’s a helpful... Read more

#CFP Two Gileads in Contemporary Fiction: Margaret Atwood and Marilynne Robinson

Last updated on: December 29, 2019 at 10:49 pm By James F. McGrath

American Literature Association San Diego, CA May 21-24 Two Gileads in Contemporary Fiction: Margaret Atwood and Marilynne Robinson In light of the 2019 publication of The Testaments (Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale), the widespread popularity of the television adaptation of Atwood’s fiction, and a forthcoming special issue of Christianity & Literature on the subject of literature and the Christian Right, the American Religion and Literature Society and the Marilynne Robinson Society will co-host a special session on the two Gileads of contemporary... Read more

Crucified with Christ

Last updated on: December 29, 2019 at 10:49 pm By James F. McGrath

There have been suggestions over the years that Jesus faked his own death, Hugh Schonfeld’s book The Passover Plot being the best-known example. That’s not what this post is about. If anyone is disappointed by that fact, let me direct them to one of my earliest published articles, “Uncontrived Messiah or Passover Plot? A Study of A Johannine Apologetic Motif.” It was published in Irish Biblical Studies, and you can read it online courtesy of Butler University’s institutional repository. Here in... Read more

Retrospect and Prospect

Last updated on: December 29, 2019 at 11:04 pm By James F. McGrath

It is often strange for professors and other researchers to look back on the calendar year and ahead at the one about to begin. Our rhythm follows the academic year, and so we would more naturally celebrance new year’s day in August, and make resolutions then. It is nonetheless worth joining in with this calendrical event and reminding ourselves of things accomplished and experienced. Definitely the biggest life event of the past year was that my father passed away. The... Read more

Robotic Religion

Last updated on: December 29, 2019 at 10:48 pm By James F. McGrath

I thought I’d share a recording of the lunchtime discussion I led on the topic of “Robotic Religion” as part of the Religion program at Butler University’s lunchtime discussion series Religion Matters. It focuses on the current situation we find ourselves in, and thus on robots between their use in factories (so familiar we rarely think about it) and as depicted in science fiction (which connects with all sorts of interesting questions, but so much so that we can focus all... Read more

#CFP Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020

Last updated on: December 21, 2019 at 4:24 pm By James F. McGrath

Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic 28th-29th May 2020 In “Surviving Fantasy Through Post-Colonialism”, Deepa Dharmadhikari writes that she grew up “speaking Marathi with my family, and Hindi with schoolmates and neighbours, but the only children’s books I read were in English. Less than a handful were written by Indian authors about Indian characters. . . . I grew up with half a tongue.” Her essay invites us to question our own habits: What language do we use... Read more

The Ethics of the Completed Star Wars Skywalker Saga

Last updated on: December 27, 2019 at 1:03 pm By James F. McGrath

As I said in my review of The Rise of Skywalker, I’ve long seen the outlook of the Star Wars as being about balance, a Taoist vision of light and dark, calm and anger, passivity and exertion, rather than a Zoroastrian one, as it were. I’ve also long said that a major focus is redemption of enemies rather than destroying them, as Luke Skywalker does with his father Anakin. And so I wondered how the Skywalker story would be brought... Read more

Paul APB 6

Last updated on: December 26, 2019 at 7:22 pm By James F. McGrath

This video about Paul’s meeting with James is really interesting, and gets at a key insight that Rob Orlando offers into Paul’s final journey to Jerusalem. To be sure, it is possible to overplay the differences between Paul and James. But the tendency is much more for people to underestimate the disagreements, I think. If Rob is right, I think there may be interesting implications not only for our understanding of Paul himself and the outlook of the Book of... Read more

The Gospel of the Gaps (and the Gaps of the Gospels)

Last updated on: December 23, 2019 at 7:40 am By James F. McGrath

One of the things that mythicists regularly mention is the (in their view) long period between when the events that gave rise to Christianity transpired, and our earliest copies of texts that mention them. They clearly have no sense of what is typical when it comes to ancient history more generally. I can understand their dismissal of and impatience with Christian apologists who seem to think that, because we have relatively earlier copies of early Christian writings than most other... Read more