… on their new Master of Arts in Biblical Languages. In growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church I got used to the idea that in order to teach Bible or become a pastor one started studying theology/religion at the undergraduate level and then continued at the graduate level with the fundamentals out of the…
Every so often there’s another outburst of complaints about how religion is being suppressed in this country, and how it no longer has its place in the public square. And there are the occasional really silly incidents that actually support such a claim. I note, for example, that our local public library here in Pensacola,…
I have noted before that while Bible classes taught from an academic perspective have been ruled constitutional, I still think they are very bad ideas. Including the Bible as it applies in literature and history classes is appropriate, though it should be proportional to its importance to the field, and should be taught in a…
I have previously written about my opposition to including specific Bible classes in public schools, and to the NCBCPS curriculum in particular, if one chose to have such a class in any case. Now in a column on WorldNetDaily Chuck Norris talks about using this curriculum as “Your first step to get God back into…
Today I went on a sort of odyssey through a couple of theologically conservative blogs. My journey started at Adrian Warnock’s blog, where he has another quote from somebody supporting penal substitutionary atonement (PSA): While not denying the wide-ranging character of Christs atonement, I am arguing that penal substitution is foundational and the heart of…
Ed Brayton has an informative post on the process of selecting a Bible curriculum in Odessa, TX. I haven’t had time to follow the case closely, but it appears that Ed is doing so. If one is to have a specifically Bible curriculum in high school, as opposed to appropriate mentions in literature, history, and…
Watching recent commentary on the Answers in Genesis creation museum, that huge waste of $27 million designed to proved that dinosaurs lived with human beings and even were preserved on the ark has led me to believe that education on this subject in church and Sunday School is even more important than I thought. I…
I have finally started reading Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman. It came in about a week ago via interlibrary loan, and I have now gotten through the introduction and the first chapter. Unlike my response to The God Delusion, I’m not going to post all sections at once, but rather I’ll just post my reactions…
[Continuing my series responding to The God Delusion. The starting entry is From the Land of the Deluded.] It may surprise many readers to know that I have a number of points of agreement with Dawkins. Since I have blogged about many of these things before, I’m only going to give a basic list with…
[This is part of my series of responses to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. The parent entry is From the Land of the Deluded.] I truly have to wonder to what extent Dawkins is arguing in favor of freedom, and to what extent he is arguing in favor of the enforcement of his own…
