From the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune: Why is the sky blue? Facts you should know. The quiz doesn’t provide scoring, but the answers are at the end. Bar that I must say I mentally fudged the amount of water (thinking “about 3/4” instead of the precise 71%), and the “sky is blue question” when I just…
Is there a resurrection in your future? In your near future? Often concerned Christians complain about the pagan background of Easter, and such practices as Easter eggs, bunny rabbits, and all the signs of spring. Pagan religions in many countries have celebrated spring and the new life that it represents. Fall and spring festivals celebrate…
[Note: The reason I am jumping from 1:1-4 to 2:1-4 is that my study guide is thematic rather than verse by verse. Hebrews 1:5-14 is part of the reading for lesson 5. I am not including a post on textual issues in this passage, because there are no substantial textual issues.] Because this passage is…
[The following Good Friday meditation is extracted and slightly adapted from my book Not Ashamed of the Gospel: Confessions of a Liberal Charismatic, pp. 17-22. This post was truncated at some point in the history of this blog. This is a restoration of the content on January 6, 2018.] There might be many reasons why…
In an earlier post, Dating the Book of Daniel, I mentioned that I had ordered Ernest Lucas’s volume on Daniel in the Apollos Old Testament Commentary series. I now have received, read, and returned that volume, and I thought I would post a few notes. I have to admit that I continue to be puzzled…
Is democracy the right thing for every country in the world? Is America the best example of this? Should we make it one of our policy goals to implement democracy in other countries? Newsweek’s Christopher Dickey doesn’t like America’s example of democracy, and he says so at length at The Mechanics of Democracy (Newsweek on…
Note: I strongly recommend that if you are taking my class in Hebrews, or who are following my study guide through the book answer the study guide questions before reading this entry. The purpose of the thought questions is to provide an opportunity to think. These are just some of my own thoughts on the…
Not Ashamedof the Gospel:Confessionsof aLiberal Charismatic In my book Not Ashamed of the Gospel, I comment that God respects us: God Respects You Some of my more theologically inclined friends may be questioning this one, but God created humanity a little bit less than God (Psalm 8:4), and he allows human beings to make their…
Just two posts ago I commented on the resistance to evolutionary theory and what I think are the actual reasons for it. Today I came across a blog that truly confirms everything I said from the other side. The blog is called The Sheep’s Crib. In a post titled EVOLUTION: Croco-fish can’t crack Chritian commitment!….
To conclude the content part of my series on Biblical criticism, I want to discuss literary criticism. Much of the practice of literary criticism is similar to genre and to a lesser extent canonical criticism. Essentially, literary criticism involves forgetting about the historical and theological aspects and simply reading the Bible as literature. One can…
