I’ve only just gotten caught up on some of last week’s sci-fi. In a stunning turn of events, Fringe last week started fantastically (with a guest appearance by Jorge Garcia, who played Hurley on LOST) and ended weakly, with the katra soul of Spock William Bell taking over Olivia Dunham’s body and making her do a merely OK impression of Leonard Nimoy. Presumably the writers felt like they had to come up with a real challenge for Anna Torv, since... Read more

The ASOR blog draws attention to Dig-it-al Near Eastern Archaeology, an online supplement that includes reviews and essays. It currently includes a review of a museum exhibit on the “feminine side” of the Biblical God. Read more

Actually, you don’t have to sell your soul. Just come up with a T-shirt slogan that John Loftus will like. It’s almost the same thing, I hear some of you say, but still, not quite. 🙂 If you would like me to win a free copy of Earl Doherty’s newer, improved (?) book, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man – The Case for a Mythical Jesus, so that I can interact with its arguments in the future (I only have the earlier version,... Read more

The site “Stuff Fundies Like” features posts both satirical and serious related to the phenomenon of Christian fundamentalism. A recent post, promising to be the first in a series on Baptist distinctives, highlights the way in which the widespread talk about and affirmation of the authority of the Bible does not correspond to the Bible  actually being authoritative. Read more

This is the first time I noticed what Inside Higher Ed has apparently been doing for several years: ranking NCAA teams as though their victory on the court matched their accomplishment in academic courses. Butler won! Read more

Hacking Christianity drew my attention to a new feature allowing one’s comments on a blog post via Facebook to also appear on the blog itself. I’m happy to respect the privacy of commenters, but as someone who approaches Facebook more as a place for networking than a place just for very close friends and family, I suppose that even those who comment on a post of mine on Facebook are interacting with a wide audience. I have often regretted that... Read more

Jim Linville has posted concerns about the proliferation of sessions at the SBL Annual Meeting which focus on or relate to theology and the concerns of religious communities, even while curtailing or cutting back on some more mainstream scholarly sessions. I am in two minds about this, since it is certainly the case that many Biblical scholars, including ones who are thoroughly committed to the scholarly enterprise using the same methods that are used in secular scholarship, nonetheless do their... Read more

Rogue Classicism shared information about a conference on the musical reception of classical antiquity. Please, someone do a paper on Genesis (I mean the band, of course). Classical references abound. Here’s one of my favorite examples – Cinema Show, which mentions Tiresias: One could trace this one figure through progressive rock – I discovered this evening that Tiresias also gets a passing mention in the song by Styx, “Castle Walls.” But the keyboard solo in the latter (if one can... Read more

This is a friendly reminder to those who need to change their clocks tonight (or early tomorrow morning, to be precise) because of daylight savings time. If you are not in a part of the world where this applies, or you were really hoping to have an excuse to get to church late tomorrow, please disregard this message. Read more

The question of whether Paul’s minimal information about Jesus is sufficient to confirm that Paul intended to refer to a real, flesh and blood, historical human being is a key point of disagreement between the historicist, agnostic and mythicist positions regarding Jesus’ historicity. In addition to the references to Jesus’ birth and crucifixion, we ought to also note the reference to his blood (see e.g. Romans 3:25; 5:19; 1 Corinthians 10:16; 11:25) and death (e.g. Romans 4:25; 5:10; 6:3,5,10; 1 Corinthians 11:26;... Read more