Christian Reconciliation Carnival #1
The first ever Christian Reconciation Blog Carnival is up and running at Heart, Mind, Soul, and Strength. Check it out!
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The Real Cost of Health Care
Hmm! I don’t really know what that is! But Robert J. Samuelson has an excellent column on Newsweek (via MSNBC) that discusses the issue. He makes a number of excellent points, including pointing out that we’ve hidden the actual cost of health care, though I suspect not nearly so successfully in this country as in…
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Genesis 9: A New World
Genesis 9 looks at the beginnings of life and society after the flood. It can be of interest in a number of ways, because along with parts of chapter 8 it supports the Noahide laws, and is the foundation for blood being forbidden to eat blood (Acts 15:20, which does not quote this, but must…
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Iran and the Iraq War
And now the third in a series of short posts–an unprecedented attack of brevity for me! I’ve been saying “Iran” over and over again as the war in Iraq was first contemplated and then executed. An article today in the Washington Post talks about the influence of Iran and the fears, entirely justified in my…
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Codex on Mesopotamian Creation Stories
Tyler Williams is beginning a series on this topic. After reading just the first entry I strongly recommend that any of my readers interested in the creation stories take a look at this material. For those who have not been following my material you can look at the Genesis category on my Participatory Bible Study…
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The Difficulty of Scientific Conspiracies
. . . is illustrated here, in a nice post by Carl Zimmer. I’m extremely interested in the debate about these fossils, so I read what I can find, but I lack the scientific expertise to have a relevant comment on the science. What I would like to point out is the way in which…
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Christianity | Politics | War
N.T. Wright on Just War
Support for the Iraq war has been largely characterized as a liberal-conservative debate, with lots of negative adjectives attached to each political stream. Supporters are supposedly patriots who support using our military to defend our innocent citizens while opponents are portrayed as weak folks whose only desire is to surrender. There are, however, quite a…
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Decisive Verse, Decisive Choice
I was having a conversation with a friend who is a United Methodist pastor a few years back. He was a well educated man with a doctoral degree and Arminian to the core. We got onto the subject of predestination vs free will, and he quoted the following to me (though not in my own…
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Conservative Political Deception
Ben Witherington has a good post today about political deception with a brief intro on parthenogenesis. On the latter, I would simply note that I see no particular benefit to Christianity in proving that a virgin birth is possible. The value of the doctrine stems at least in part from the fact that it is…
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Value of the Historical-Critical Method
I’ve written a number of posts on the historical-critical method previously on this blog (category, listing 28 posts). It is one of the areas on which I can properly be described as unabashedly liberal. I fully embraced the critical approach to Bible study as the starting point, and as the best approach to ascertaining the…