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On Being a Liberal Charismatic Believer

I found a new blog (for me) this week via John Meunier—To Him Which is Yes. I was particularly attracted by the post John linked to, Bringing back belief. Jack Burden, the blogger, tells the story of how he silenced a committee meeting, doubtless an extremely useful skill under any circumstances, but the point is…

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Willful, Crusading Ignorance

I took the title of this post from one of the speakers in the video embedded below. I’ve followed this IUPUI case for some time, mostly via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, but also through the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). This case is particularly egregious, but political correctness, or the idea that…

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The Difficulty of Appropriate Public Prayer

MSNBC.com reports that there is a bit of a kerfuffle over whether Rick Warren will use the name of Jesus in his prayer at Barack Obama’s inauguration. At the same time we have a group of atheist and humanist groups suing to prevent any prayer at all at this public event. I confess to mixed…

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The Imagination Stopper

Carl Zimmer has a post on the Loom that discusses irreducible complexity along with some examples. I found it very interesting how we start with a bicycle as irreducibly complex, a claim of an intelligent design (ID) advocate, and then see how the irreducible is reduced through the magic of Google. There are many ways…

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My Favored Translation Method

John Hobbins divided translations into two classes in a recent post. Which do you prefer: (1) a translation that makes sense on its own, without off-site explanation, or (2) a translation that is a head-scratcher until an explanation is given which clears things up, and even then leaves you wondering if you have it right?…

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Interpreting the Bible II: Excursus on the Plain Sense

I want to tie up a few loose ends in my first post on this series as well as point out some things on which I will need to comment further. In particular, I read this post by John Hobbins that references a post by Wayne Leman regarding complementarianism and the “plain sense” of scripture….

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Interpreting the Bible I: Obvious Exegesis

I’m starting a short (I hope) series on interpreting the Bible. This is in response to a series of posts I read recently. The first two were from EvolutionBlog, OEC vs. YEC and The “Terrible Texts” of the Bible. I then encountered A question for Christians on Positive Liberty, which discusses some poor (in the…

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Academic Freedom and Creationism in SciAm

Glenn Branch and Eugenie Scott have an article in Scientific American titled The Latest Face of Creationism in the Classroom, detailing the latest approach to getting creationism in the classroom. Since I touched on this briefly in two previous posts, I thought I’d link to this longer article so people can get the context. I…