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What Is Biblical Literacy?
We complain about it, write about it, claim it’s important or even critical, design programs to create it, but what is it? I don’t mean that none of us know what we mean when we say “biblically literate” or “biblically illiterate,” but do we all mean the same thing? I don’t think we do, and…
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Fences: Mending or Rending
The following is a sermon I presented at the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Pensacola on September 11,2005 and originally posted here on September 13, 2005. I’m reposting it because when I went to look for it, I found that the original post had somehow been truncated, and also because there is a one word at a…
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Experiencing the (Baptism of the) Holy Spirit
This is a topic where I tend to make just about everyone uncomfortable. Long time readers may recall a previous discussion of speaking in tongues, and my own experience of it. Those who expect me to be intellectually oriented and rational are uncomfortable with mystical experiences, and many who are comfortable with the mystical experiences…
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Free Burma Day
I will be participating in Free Burma day tomorrow. There will be a banner reading Free Burma, underlined for the full day and I will not be posting. You can find more information on this action here.
On Creationisms – Quotes Link
I want to promote this link from the comments to a full post. There are a number of valuable quotes in this post showing the different views of creation that are held by various Christians. The binary creation vs evolution controversy oversimplifies the issues considerably. One should always be careful with quotes. First, I have…
C. F. D. Moule
Peter Kirk reports the passing of C. F. D. Moule. I have enjoyed using his Idiom Book of New Testament Greek. Peter provides some details and related links. He will be missed by the Biblical Studies community.
Blogrolling Blogrolls Temporarily Disabled
I have temporarily disabled my blogrolling.com based blogrolls due to very slow loading. I will look into what can be done. Some blogrolls can probably be restored using another method. For the moment, however, the site was unusable with those blogrolls enabled.
MBWR #131 and My Highlights
The Methodist Blogs Weekly Roundup has been posted. Thanks to Allan Bevere for his hard work. I’m doing today what I wish I always had time to do, which is look at a bunch of the posts and pick out some of my own highlights. These don’t coincide with the “Best of the Methodist Blogosphere”…
Thoughts on Lists of Spiritual Gifts
In one of the sermons I heard this morning (I attended services at two different churches), the scripture reading was from Ephesians 4:1-12. When Ephesians 4:11 was read, I remembered a discussion I had some time back about whether pastors and teachers here was intended to refer to one group of people. The individual with…
Satellite Imagery Confirms Myanmar Atrocities
Those interested in the situation in [tag]Myanmar[/tag] (formerly Burma) will be interested in this story from ScienceNOW published by the AAAS. Researchers used high resolution images from commercial satellites to confirm a substantial number of reports of atrocities by the Burmese military. For those interested in taking action, see the U. S. Campaign for Burma.
Culture, Translation, and Literal Meaning
I just read two excellent articles on Bible translation, one on a blog, and the other coming to me via e-mail. It seems to be very difficult for people to get an idea of just how language works. The notion that each word has a fixed, eternal, precise meaning just seems to hang on. Learning…
Theisms, Creationisms, and Evolutionisms: An Exercise in Definition
The debate about labels is one of the most interesting aspects of the creation-evolution controversy to me, and at the same time one of the most frustrating. Since my primary training is in Biblical languages, and by my own efforts in linguistics, the way words are used simply fascinates me. There is plenty of influence…
Comments and Akismet
Akismet has grabbed a few comments again, largely on the Jena 6 issue. If anyone did comment and thought you had been censored, it was inadvertent. Check for your comment now. If it still does not appear, enter it again. I would appreciate a comment on this post letting me know when you commented and…
Richard Colling Letter
A few days ago I added Steve Martin’s blog An Evangelical Dialogue on Evolution to my blogroll and subscribed to it’s RSS feed. I have mentioned frequently that there are a number of evangelical Christians who accept evolution, and I’m glad to see more of them involved in the debate. Today Steve posted a letter…
Most Obvious Baseball Quote of the Day
Since my step-son John Webb played for their AAA Iowa Cubs this year, I keep close watch on the cubs in general. I just love it when someone provides us with some information we couldn’t have figured out for ourselves: Were still in the drivers seat, manager Lou Piniella said. Weve just got to start…
Mychal Bell out on Bail
MSNBC.com reports that Mychal Bell has been released on bail. More importantly, the prosecutor is says he will no longer fight the ruling of the appeals court that requires Bell be tried as a juvenile. This is good news. Now a juvenile court needs to deal with this in an even-handed manner, but one that…
Breaking Christian News and Nereus=Noah
In my Breaking Christian News e-mail today the headline story was Depictions of Noah, the “Wet One”, Discovered in Ancient Greek Art. This sort of thing makes me crazy. The article will leave many Christians with the impression that somehow Greek archeology or [tag]Greek Mythology[/tag] has now produced some sort of proof for the stories…
Larry Craig Staying for Now
Senator [tag]Larry Craig[/tag] apparently lacks even the integrity to resign. He’s decided to hang on because a judge has taken his request to have his guilty plea withdrawn “under advisement” according to MSNBC’s First Read. This guy is an embarrassment to the nation and should resign now.
Religious Doctrine Trumping Science
According to this story on MSNBC.com, Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claims that two European nations are trying to kill off Africans by providing condoms that are already infected with the virus: I know of two countries in Europe who are making condoms with (the) virus on purpose, they want to finish with African people as part…
Jena 6 Documents
Laura Curtis has worked with Joe Carter to make primary documents from the [tag]Jena 6[/tag] case available on the internet. This is an important effort, and I would like to make sure it gets maximal exposure in the blogosphere. Thanks to Laura for arranging for these documents and to Joe for hosting them on his…
Creation-Evolution Links 9/26/07
Well, this is rather quick for another round, but there have been some more good posts I’d like to call attention to. Aetiology has a good post and updates on the community college teacher fired apparently for calling the early chapters of Genesis a myth. I referred to this event in an earlier post I…
Grief: Finding the Candle of Light
Note: I want to give fair warning on this post. It’s both commercial and personal, and deviates from my normal approach on this blog to a considerable extent. When I married my wife Jody, our son (my stepson) James Webb was already in chemotherapy for cancer. Over the next five years we experienced remission twice,…
Larry Craig and Accountability
I regard [tag]accountability[/tag] as an extremely important, even critical value. Not that it’s more fundamental than others logically, but it helps hold people to such values as they profess and as are expected of them by law and custom. If people are not expected to uphold the values they profess, then there is little point…
Complegalitarian
Wayne Leman, in a commendable effort to maintain a tighter focus on Better Bibles, has started a new group blog Complegalitarian, which he defines as “Adj. Pertaining to complementarianism and egalitarianism.” This would take the largest single topic not directly related to Bible translation off of the Better Bibles blog. As I read it, discussion…
Personality and Bible Translation Preference
My post yesterday, titled must personality, is in response to a two part series by Wayne Leman over at Better Bibles. You can check out part 1 and part 2 there, along with a quite substantial number of comments. Wayne says that his initial thesis, which he presents even though he feels it was disconfirmed,…
Christian Carnival #191 Posted
. . . at Pseudo-Polymath. I’m not in it for the very simple reason that I forgot my submission. Oh well, next week is already here!