“The Celestial Toymaker” is an episode of Doctor Who from the William Hartnell era, and most of the original footage is lost. Gary Zimmer sums up the significance of this early episode of Doctor Who very well: “`The Celestial Toymaker‘ was unlike any previous Doctor Who story. Until then stories had been in either of two very broad categories, historical or science fiction. In a bold departure from this formula the Doctor and his companions find themselves in the realm of... Read more
HT Prophets and Pop Stars And in case you’re wondering if Jesus had a sense of humor… Read more
“No reader of Genesis has literally been expelled from the Garden of Eden. No reader has seen firsthand the cherubim and whirling, flaming sword east of the tree of life. And yet, Genesis clearly invites its readers to adopt Adam and Eve as metaphorical representations of themselves. In fact, it is a casualty of translation that the Hebrew אדם [‘adam] and חוה [ḥavah] are typically rendered ‘Adam’ and ‘Eve’, when in fact their names literally are ‘Humanity’ and ‘Life’. Few... Read more
Three calls for papers/proposals and a blog tour that is coming soon: Tufts University will be holding an NEH workshop in the summer, “Working with Text in a Digital Age“ (HT Fragmentary Texts) The Society for Ancient Mediterranean Religions seeks paper proposals for a conference called “Religion in Pieces” to be held in April at Brown University. The theme is the reconstruction of ancient Mediterranean religion based on piecemeal evidence. From Sansblogue, an invitation to contribute to a volume on Global... Read more
Isabella Rossini asks: Or perhaps one could say that if Noah only took heterosexual organisms on his ark, then evolution has done some interesting things with them since then. 🙂 HT Vridar Read more
The second episode in the Black Guardian trilogy, “Terminus,” is another episode I actually remember watching in my younger years, although some of the details had become sketchy. This is an episode which features an element that is common in Doctor Who and illustrates a major contrast with Star Wars. In the latter, it is a challenge even to destroy a planet using technology. In Doctor Who, it seems that the very universe itself is in peril surprisingly frequently. This... Read more
I had forgotten the name of this episode, “Mawdryn Undead,” and so when I checked out the DVDs of the Black Guardian Trilogy from the library, I remembered the second and third by name but was drawing a blank on what this first one was about. But once I got past that memory failure regarding the name, I realized this was an episode that I absolutely loved when I first saw it in my younger years. After all, if having... Read more
This cartoon by David Hayward seems to me to illustrate well the situation we find ourselves in as interpreters – whether of life or of texts. The danger is when we genuinely believe that we are free, having managed to loose ourselves from the influence of upbringing, tradition, personality, and so many other factors. And of course, there are plenty of ways that we can be prisoners of such things, beyond in matters of interpretation. Read more
Via Rachel Held Evans, I learned of Jim LePage’s “Word Bible Designs” which attempt to encapsulate what is central to a book in the Bible in a single image. Many of them are provocative, in ways that range from the gory to the racy to the simply creative and striking. Here are a few samples: Click through to see more. Let me know which, if any, strike you, and why. And do take a look at Rachel’s interview with... Read more
Via Rachel Held Evans, I learned of Jim LePage’s “Word Bible Designs” which attempt to encapsulate what is central to a book in the Bible in a single image. Many of them are provocative, in ways that range from the gory to the racy to the simply creative and striking. Here are a few samples: Click through to see more. Let me know which, if any, strike you, and why. And do take a look at... Read more
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