It looks like they didn’t follow my advice in the previous post. Read more

I hope all readers have a happy new year! Read more

NT Wrong has not only brought back the Biblioblog Top 50, but also introduced the first and only objective ranking method. Enjoy! 🙂 Read more

The responses both here on the blog and on Facebook to the e-mail I shared yesterday is indicative of the significant number of people who have the experience of finding their faith and religious beliefs changing in response to new information. In many cases, that new information is not so much “new” as new to them. This highlights one negative aspect of fundamentalist attempts to shield people from critical scholarship: when someone from such a background eventually discovers it, instead... Read more

I thought I’d repost something I wrote a couple of years ago, since the issue appears to still be a live one. Apparently the forces of darkness are mounting an attack, this time on the Christian holiday of New Year’s Day, which commemorates and worshipfully celebrates the anniversary of the day on which a Romanian monk miscalculated the year in which our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ was born. In addition to the anticalendricals, it seems that the Chinese, Jews, and... Read more

I’ve had an e-mail exchange with a blog reader, and like many who commented on recent posts about Christmas, this individual is wrestling with changes to their perspective on faith as a result of learning more through academic study of the Bible. I asked for and received permission to share their last e-mail here, in the hope that it might generate some discussion that will be useful not only to the writer of the e-mail, but also to other readers. I... Read more

Tom Verenna has an interesting post that shares his own personal perspective on Biblical studies, carrying on conversation with many scholars and bloggers in the process. Read more

Religion Nerd has a post entitled “Jesus in Space” that tells of a look into Mormon art and music, and the fascinating discoveries the blog’s author made in the process about the interplanetary cosmology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and its theology. In the process, you get the lyrics and a clip of a Mormon hymn, “If You Could Hie To Kolob” as well as some seriously hard rock music from The Osmonds. I presume... Read more

Many discussions about the Bible end up being unprofitable because they focus exclusively on whether the Bible is “true” or “false” but ignore matters of genre that are relevant to such questions. A few recent posts around the blogosphere illustrate this point. Steve Wiggins discusses the dating of Daniel and its genre. We have enough examples of apocalyptic literature that we ought to approach any work in this genre with the assumption that it is pseudepigraphal and written after at least... Read more

Even when it comes to something as clearly in the realm of the study of religion as the rhetoric of monotheism, science fiction and humor prove to be relevant. Marc Cortez shared this Savage Chickens cartoon:  The first thing that came to mind was what a nice illustration this provides of how one often finds what can be called “rhetorical monotheism” in religions which are polytheistic. A deity is appealed to as the only one who can save from a... Read more