My colleague Brad Matthies has posted a review of the interesting-sounding book Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground by Jonathan Kay. For the record, he’s the one who connected that book’s focus with mythicism, not me. Read more
An article in Religion Dispatches offers an interesting perspective on the need for a religious case for LGBT equality. Here’s a sample: If the LGBT movement is identified solely as secular, it becomes easier for conservative Christians to define the movement as “the world” against which faith must stand. How much more powerful, she says, to say that the world is full of inequalities, the world says it’s fine to deny people the basic life-giving reality of housing based on... Read more
Everyone has presumably heard by now that Unsettled Christianity is the new #1 in the biblioblogosphere, as far as Alexa ranking is concerned. Sadly, the Alexa ranking system cannot differentiate blogs that share a domain, as those at Patheos do, and so this may well be my last time in the top 50. But you can still keep Exploring Our Matrix in the Top 10 by vote! Since that ranking hasn’t been posted yet, I assume there is still time... Read more
There is a new article at The Huffington Post by Deshna Ubeda on progressive Christianity and the education of children. I know from my own experience that it can be a struggle to find resources that will help children learn to appreciate a religious tradition, but not uncritically, and to be open to expecting to find truth in others’ viewpoints and perspectives. I have spoken with people of a number of different religions, and no religion at all, who wrestle... Read more
Congratulations to Joel Watts and the other bloggers at Unsettled Christianity who have also unseated the reigning champion of the biblioblog wars, Jim West. Exploring Our Matrix came in at #3 – probably for the last time, since Alexa doesn’t rank separate blogs on this site. See the full list of top biblioblogs here. Read more
The “argument from authority” is a well-known logical fallacy which involves citing an expert as though appeal to the opinion of any one such qualified individual could, on its own, settle the matter. Mythicists, in my experience, are notorious for appealing to authority. as long as one can find a historian who penned a sentence which, taken out of context, seems to support mythicism, or a New Testament scholar who says something that mythicists agree with, they will be appealed... Read more
In the story about Cornelius in Acts 10, Peter sees a vision in which he is told to kill and eat all sorts of things that were prohibited by the Jewish Law. Peter understandably refuses to eat such unclean things, only to be told by the heavenly voice that he should not call unclean what God has cleansed. Eventually he comes to understand this as a point about God cleansing not only prohibited foods but even excluded people. Previously I posted... Read more
My review of the book So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004) has been published in The Journal of Postcolonial Theory and Theology. It can be read online in pdf form. Since constraints of space necessitated that I not go into too much detail about any particular story in this collection, below I am posting an earlier draft of the review, before I shortened and reworked... Read more
I’ve been enjoying the series on “Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography in the Bible” over at BioLogos, and the latest installment discusses the reasons why, without additional information provided by astronomy and the sciences more generally, ancient people could not realize that their sense perception of the universe was inaccurate. Changing our perspective is hard, but the video below, shared by Phil Plait, takes an already-delightful astronomy video that has been circulating lately, and adapts it to more accurately reflect the universe... Read more
Over at Ari’s Blog of Awesome, there is a post reviewing Robert Price’s contribution to the volume Sources of the Jesus Tradition: Separating History from Myth. Ari describes it as “one of the most frustrating essays” in the volume, and having previously reviewed a chapter Price wrote for another volume, I am not surprised. Still trying to decide whether it is worth clicking through? Well here is the equivalent of a thousand-word sample, in the form of a pictorial representation... Read more
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