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New site for the blog of Dr. James F. McGrath, Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'christianity'
From The Archives: What's Wrong With Being 'Right'?
For those who are enthusiastic about the voices calling for a return to or preservation of the Christian foundations of our society, you will probably find yourself largely in agreement with the senti...
What Makes Good Good? A Case For Compassion
Those who have subscribed to the comments or keep an eye on the recent comments sidebar will know that the discussion started by my post "What Is Good?" It seems that we have two views colliding that ...
Monotheism and Me
University of Illinois Press has posted a short entry on their blog by me, on the subject of monotheism, in connection with my new book The Only True God....
Britons and the Resurrection
New Humanist draws attention to a poll in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph indicating that Jesus was the top dead person that those surveyed would like to meet if they had the chance, chosen ...
Good vs. Evil, Indignation vs. Indigestion
Imagine three situations that come up in real life:1) You are made aware in the local news that lives were lost in a fire that could have been prevented if a recent safety inspection had been as thoro...
Evolution and Liberal Christianity
As a Liberal Christian who has been a vocal opponent of young-earth creationists, cdesign proponentsists and other pseudoscientific movements both on my blog and in the classroom, I can only respond t...
When Did The Word Become Flesh?
I will be preaching this coming Sunday at my church, and the text I've chosen is John 1:1-18. I've devoted quite a bit of scholarly attention to that familiar and well-worn passage (two chapters in Jo...
Sinful Certainty
I just had a brief conversation with another church member (he also teaches Sunday school) which managed in a very short time to touch on evolution, the dome in Genesis 1, JEPD and Mosaic authorship o...
Adventures in the Spirit: Part Four
In Part Four of Adventures in the Spirit, Philip Clayton focuses on one of the toughest theological issues, namely divine action. Abstract discussion of concepts of God are perhaps meaningless, but ce...
Adventures in the Spirit: Part Three
Part Three of Philip Clayton's Adventures in the Spirit is about Panentheism. Chapter 8 offers an introduction to panentheism and the closely related subject of process thought. A cumulative case is m...
Islam in Sunday School
Today in my Sunday school class we talked about Islam. In recent weeks, we had turned to the subject of how Christians might/should view other religions, and it was felt that those in the class would ...
Cafeteria Christianity
A comment on my previous post got me thinking about the image of "cafeteria Christianity" - the idea being of a smorgasbord from which one picks and chooses, which is not in and of itself necessarily ...
Other Religions in Sunday School
Today in my Sunday school class we continued to discuss how we as Christians might, and should, view other religious traditions. To facilitate this, the pastor and I will provide an overview about som...
Kerala's Christians and their Manuscripts
There's an interesting video on the PBS web site about the Thomas Christians of South India and present-day projects to rediscover and preserve their manuscripts....
Around the Blogosphere (Biblical Studies Carnival Supplement)
I didn't know what else to call this post, since there was so much in the blogosphere over the past couple of days, and it seemed worth mentioning. This post includes the most recent biblioblog activi...
Review of Robin Meyers, Saving Jesus From The Church
Review of Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).Sometimes a book you didn't expect to read, and hadn't...
Celebrating Easter with the Doubting Disciples
The tradition of viewing Easter as the end of disbelief can be traced back to the New Testament itself, to the Gospel of John, where Thomas, being absent when Jesus appeared to the other disciples, ex...
Judged by the Smoke Monster
In the most recent episode of LOST, as in other earlier ones, we saw the "smoke monster" make someone confront their past, with the aim of bringing about repentance and a change in them. In my recent ...
Lessons in (and from) a One-Room Schoolhouse
I'm happy I was able to join my son on a field trip to 1892, to spend the day at a one-room schoolhouse. It was delightful, but it reminded me of a trip I took when I lived in the UK to a similar hist...
A Parable and a Testimony
There was once a rich man, who was very generous. This man who had two sons.The eldest son had seen his father sometimes forced to do without, even though his land was fruitful and his business prospe...
Following the Historical Jesus
What does it mean to be a follower of the historical Jesus? What does it mean, in other words, to be a Christian who takes historical questions and historical methods seriously?I think it means, among...
Review of Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted
In his latest book, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them), Bart Ehrman seeks to introduce a wider audience to important aspects of th...
Monsters vs. Aliens
I just got back from seeing Monsters vs. Aliens. Unfortunately it wasn't in 3D at the theater I went to. I won't give away any of the entertaining details, lest I spoil anyone's enjoyment. But I will ...
Sunday School: Homosexuality and Leviticus 17-20
Today in my Sunday school class, we continued our discussion of homosexuality. Today's class began by focusing on the section of Leviticus that includes its two mentions of the prohibition against "ly...
God and Gays
I want to mention a very recent documentary, God and Gays, featuring gay Christians talking about the struggles they have faced as they have worked through their spiritual and sexual identities. While...
Obama on the Bible: Protecting Isaac from Abraham
As president Obama, himself a Christian, continues to make decisions about stem cells and other matters that most Republican Christians disagree with him on, it is worth seeing again this speech about...
Sinful Nature and the Changeling
The reading for this past week's Sunday school class was Romans 5, to provide an opportunity to bring our last two topics (Jesus' life and work, and evolution) together. We didn't actually discuss the...
Partial Knowlege, Totally Dangerous
We human beings have a tendency to take what little information we have and extrapolate from it into a worldview that guides our lives and our decisions. Perhaps that is inevitable. What makes it par...
Evolution Sunday Quote of the Day (Dr. Isis)
"As a scientist I conduct research the same way everyone else does (or, so I assume), guided by the scientific method. I attempt to interpret my data using my current knowledge of physiology, and I d...
Why Modern Fundamentalism Shakes Confidence in the Bible
Christian Fundamentalists tell everyone that they ought to accept the truthfulness of the Bible. It is painfully ironic, therefore, that the character of fundamentalism has the effect of powerfully un...
