From the monthly archives:

June 2009

Shake your students’ faith: a parable

June 30, 2009

Matthew Burgess (congratulations on the move to Wordpress BTW) draws my attention to an ongoing dialogue between Peter Enns and Bruce Waltke. I note the way in which concern about “shaking students’ faith” is used as a blanket critique of Enns’ hermeneutical model. The whole post is worth a read.
And he said: “There were two [...]

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Go on then: is religion the opium of the people?

June 29, 2009

For reasons best known to itself, the Guardian decided its Comment is Free Question this week should be “Is religion the opium of the people?” and started things off with a lengthy quote from Marx’s introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. This is somewhat akin to walking into an [...]

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An odd musing on Paul, the kingdom and the political church

June 29, 2009

I got stuck this morning on the opening of 1 Thessalonians, and particularly the apparently locative ἐν of “in God the Father” which is how most translations and commentators take it.
Here’s the text:
Παῦλος καὶ Σιλουανὸς καὶ Τιμόθεος τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ Θεσσαλονικέων ἐν θεῷ πατρὶ καὶ κυρίῳ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ, χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη
From Paul and Silvanus and [...]

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St Paul’s bones and skeletal journalism

June 29, 2009

A happy feast of St Peter and St Paul to you. Apparently St Paul has now caught up with St Peter in having the Vatican state that they’ve found his bones. As far as the more cynical go, they’ve confirmed that some old bones in an old tomb are, well, old. But at least they’re [...]

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Are young people a good cultural diagnostic?

June 28, 2009

One of the stories I mentioned in yesterday’s weekly round-up was about the lack of belief reported by a survey of young people. The fullest two accounts of this survey are those in the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph (where it fits their template of a society always going downhill as they see it). [...]

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From memes to unmentionables: this week’s round-up

June 27, 2009

A few of the posts that are worth drawing to your attention from this week’s copious number of wise words I’ve been unable to comment on so far.
Ken Brown’s meme has been very successful. Just as interesting is his summary of some of the key influences that get repeated mentions.
A Penguin survey reveals some interesting [...]

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Nope, Iran’s not important today

June 26, 2009
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On the BBC News front page 24 hours ago you were still in no doubt that Iran was a matter of tremendous global import, and, indeed, the world’s first Twitter revolution. Today … well see for yourself below. I guess, a 140 character tweet limit is about appropriate for a 140 second attention span. News? [...]

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Oh Claude, you’ve been spammed (explaining Jesus away)

June 26, 2009

I have had a visit from the same spammer who left a self-promotion on Claude Mariottini’s site. An author from what I think is a weird Jewish “heretical” sect is trying to get his even weirder book on Christianity promoted. According to the Amazon blurb:

The Real Messiah explodes the myth that Jesus was the long-prophesied [...]

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I may be a heretic, but …

June 26, 2009

… I have to confess that I’ve never really liked Michael Jackson’s music, and I’m not going to pretend to now that he’s dead.
I’ve never liked child-star singers and the weird adult reaction to them that seems a mix of gooey sentimentality and patronizing admiration. Given that Jackson was a year older than me, I [...]

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Has the BBC really come to this?

June 25, 2009

A news flash between Question Time and This Week to tell us that Michael Jackson might have died. They’re not sure yet, and can’t confirm it, but the channels reporting it are often right.
And Andrew Neil feels he has to lead “This Week” on the “sad news”.
The “sad news” if anything, was more in the [...]

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