HT Danut Manastireanu Read more

Bob Cargill offers a reflection on the announcement that Facebook will soon offer e-mail. Here are some of his thoughts on the implications for technology in higher education: As far as higher education is concerned, the first company sync Facebook profiles with university class rosters, harness Google Docs, YouTube, and Wikipedia into a Moodle-style content management system wins. The first university to employ Facebook’s networking abilities, Google’s apps, and Wikipedia’s knowledge base with their library holdings will not only lead the... Read more

The Lead shared links to posts and articles on a variety of religiously-themed video games. One that didn’t get a mention there, and which a student in my class on the Book of Revelation is going to be blogging about soon, is called Darksiders. It is loosely connected to the Book of Revelation, or so I’m told. Of related interest, there is also a video game of Dante’s Inferno. If anyone reading this has played any of these games, I’d be interested... Read more

HT to Tom Verenna for pointing out a blog post at Muertos’s Blog which explains how academia works and why conspiracy theories that dismiss or try to bypass it are not to be taken seriously. The mythicist views of Acharya S./D.M. Murdock get singled out for treatment, among other examples. Read more

James Tabor has a blog entry on the traditions about Jesus son of Pantera. This topic, and the related question of Jesus’ father and his status as legitimate or illegitimate, is one I explored in my article “Was Jesus illegitimate? The evidence of his social interactions.“ Read more

The blog Prophetic Progress has a provocative entry suggesting that Paul’s thinking on marriage is something that we should simply disagree with. Take a look, have a read, and share what you think! Read more

One proposed alternative to expensive projector rental fees for the Society of Biblical Literature conference in Atlanta  is to distribute handouts instead. Michael Bird explains why that isn’t a good idea, and offers a number of other humorous thoughts and tidbits of advice related to the upcoming conference. Read more

Tom Verenna not long ago proposed categorizing and distinguishing among mythicists, to provide further clarity about the variety of different views, which may otherwise unhelpfully get lumped together. One term/category he proposes is “Zeitgeist Mythicists” and it seems that it is a topic about which we agree. Read more

Hemant Mehta is giving away a copy of a mythicist book. The title is Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All, the author is named David Fitzgerald, and the publisher is Lulu.com. I often highlight the selectivity of so-called Biblical literalists. But on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who can only be characterized as selective freethinkers. They know enough to realize that self-published “critiques” of mainstream biology are bunk, and yet can’t see the problem... Read more

Charles Haberl’s work on studying and documenting the Mandaean language are the focus of an article in Rutgers Today. Our Mandaean Book of John translation project, Mandaic unicode, and the plight of Mandaean refugees all get mentioned in the process. Read more