As I listened to Brian McLaren’s wonderful book Do I Stay Christian? a while back I had lots of thoughts. The book has prompted me to think and reflect not only about the book’s content itself but also related (and at times tangential) matters. One major theme in the book, even if not flagged as such, is shifting from being part of a conservative Christian minority in the context of a liberal secular society, to being a liberal inclusive minority in... Read more
Traditions of Eastern Late Antiquity Unit Call for Proposals Environments and Landscapes For this session, we invite paper proposals that address how late ancient eastern traditions address the environment and landscapes, broadly conceived. Proposals might explore how texts or artifacts depict natural environments, human interactions with nature, and representations of landscapes, animals, and/or archeological sites. We encourage papers that employ diverse methodological frameworks such as insights from eco-criticism and/or environmental humanities. Contending with Scholarly Legacies: Orientalism in the study... Read more
A student in my class this semester, Sophie Schieve, had the following interaction with ChatGPT: why do people think mary magdalene was a prostitute The idea that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute is a long-standing, but incorrect, tradition in the Western Christian Church. This belief appears to have originated in the 6th or 7th century and is not based on any historical evidence. Instead, it seems to have arisen from a conflation of Mary Magdalene with several other women mentioned... Read more
The Eerdmans website now has my next book listed, which should be out sometime this year although I’m not sure on their precise schedule. Think of it as what it would be like if Pete Enns wrote an overview of the essential things to know about the New Testament, except instead of baseball references there are references to the TV show Friends. Here’s the information from the publisher’s website: The A to Z of the New Testament: Things Experts Know... Read more
One explanation someone offered for why ChatGPT imitated me so poorly (as shared in my recent post) was that it did not in fact have my words as part of its data set. I read an article on Gizmodo that suggested that this was unlikely to be the case. I decided to check, but was distracted by a pop-up window saying that the AI had been upgraded with better skills for verifying information. So I decided to ask it about... Read more
Imagine a world in which there are no church buildings. There are no formally organized online communities to sustain religious faith but only grassroots connections made by likeminded people. As a member of a religious minority, this might not be a speculative future scenario but real life. I have seen among the Mandaeans how young people in different parts of the world have connected online, even as their local Mandaean community might have fractured along lines of disagreement, dividing a... Read more
A press release about my latest book, now available for free: The Bible and Music. PALSave Textbook Creation Grant program releases first open textbook, “The Bible and Music” What do works like Handel’s “Messiah” and Bach’s “Passions” have in common with contemporary songs like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or Kendrick Lamar’s “How Much a Dollar Cost?” Like much of the world’s favorite music, these songs draw inspiration from biblical stories, and a new, free and open textbook published by the Private Academic... Read more
A conversation I had on Facebook Messenger recently with fellow New Testament scholar Sara Parks included this quip from her: (We can’t all be James McGrath and be running 25 James McGrath AI clones on round the clock global servers, all writing, podcasting, blogging, interviewing, teaching, and researching, ya know) My reply was to post 26 identical laughing emojis. But the exchange resonated with something I’d been hearing a lot lately, namely that if you ask ChatGPT to imitate a... Read more
Here’s the flyer for a talk I’ll be giving at Georgia College and State University on February 28th. Here is the blurb for the talk: Google gives you a million results, with ones paid for by advertisers at the top. ChatGPT writes grammatically perfect and even compelling prose yet is prone to make things up. The computer on Star Trek, on the other hand, gives terse answers that seem far too brief to be useful and lack nuance and complexity,... Read more
I have quoted, commented on, reviewed, and in other ways engaged with Carl Sagan here on the blog in the past. Today I’m sharing a recent comment of mine on Facebook in response to someone who had been pushing back against his classic axiom “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” He said it more than once, but this time it was in a meme in the context of a larger quote from his 1980s TV series Encyclopedia Galactica: “What counts is... Read more
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