Today we’re having a memorial for my father, who passed away last month. I wrote up a brief tribute and thought I’d share it here: James P. McGrath passed away on October 18th, 2019 in Hamburg, New York. The son of James McGrath Sr. and Mary Kate (née Flanagan), he was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1932, and lived most of his life there. Jim earned a B.A. in political science and an M.A. in social studies from Brooklyn... Read more
Reading Sura 57 again recently, I found myself wondering whether anyone had ever made some kind of comparison – whether in detailed form in a book or in a blog post or anywhere else – between Muhammad and Martin Luther. There is a striking similarity in the spirit of reform of religion that already exists rather than a claim to offer something brand new. There is a striking difference in the genre of their predominant output and in their sense... Read more
Below are details about our TELA sessions at AAR in San Diego. I thought I’d also include some links of related interest to the Mandaean Book of John, which will be the focus of a review panel in one of the sessions. First is the just-released Bible and Beyond podcast episode in which I talk with Shirley Paulson about this fascinating text and the group that produced it. My review of Bogdan Burtea’s latest translation of a Mandaean text into German will... Read more
I’ve been looking forward to sharing this podcast for a while Meredith Warren for a while. We had a conversation about her work on hierophagy, which for those who might not recognize the Greek roots of the word is “sacred eating,” i.e. eating that not only has some sort of vague or highly symbolic religious connotations such as is familiar to at least many today, but eating that was thought to mediate an actual encounter and ingestion of a reality that... Read more
Dale Tuggy recently offered a counterargument to the claim that Trinitarian thinking is correct, or at least a useful image of God, because without a plurality of persons there cannot be mutual love. By way of response, Tuggy said that one could do the same with forgiveness and say that God cannot be eternally forgiving unless there is someone to forgive, and thus there must be an eternal sinner in the godhead if this logic is sound! What do others... Read more
A while back Facebook reminded me (and several other people) of a meme with a quote from me from a couple of years ago: A friend responded by pointing out passages in Joshua in which the ESV renders the command as one to cling to the LORD. And so here’s what I wrote in response to that: There is definitely a place for clinging – but I think that both you and the author of Joshua would probably agree that a... Read more
I don’t think I’ll propose a paper, but I am incredibly interested in attending this conference, which connects directly with my course on the Bible and music. As always, I’m eager to make that area of teaching also a focus of my research more than I have thus far. Perhaps putting together a panel about some aspect of this topic would be an idea. Anyone else interested in at least discussing and brainstorming? Check out the call for papers and... Read more
This post began when I saw a piece about the cleverness of some methods of cheating. I think such articles (yes, there is more than one of that sort of thing) more than just amuse while providing a cautionary tale for educators. They illustrate that often the students who are most impressive in their dishonest ingenuity are not “stupid” in any sense of the word. They are clever and smart but scared. They know that their success in the future, and... Read more
Here is a small selection of choral music by Lithuanian composer Vytautas Miškinis, setting a variety of scriptural texts to music. His output of religious music is remarkable, as well as beautiful and moving. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_7zApVJrdo Read more
Established in 2014 at Emory University, Sacred Matters is a web magazine of public scholarship that undercuts conventional understandings of religion and reimagines the boundaries between religion and culture. As a digital publication, Sacred Matters provides a forum for innovative scholarship by taking advantage of the Internet’s capabilities to deliver audio, video, images, and text and facilitating new ways of organizing and presenting commentary, opinion, and analysis. We are always looking for contributors wanting to reach a popular audience with original ideas in a... Read more
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