Voting about the words and deeds of Jesus – ee gads! This is how many people respond when they hear about the Jesus Seminar. In this post, we will pick up on our two previous posts about translating and interpreting Biblical texts with a look at Westar Institute, home of the Jesus Seminar. (In the […]
The Trials and Tribulations of Translating Scripture 2: Pitfalls and Challenges
In Trials and Tribulations 1, we presented an overview of the history of the Bible and the various ancient manuscripts that scholars have used over the centuries to translate Biblical texts from the original languages into other languages. We noted that translating from ancient languages and incomplete manuscripts copied centuries later present challenges to translators […]
The Trials and Tribulations of Translating Scripture 1: Introduction
The Bible: a vitally important text in Western history. Contrary to some popular misperceptions: not one book but many; not written in King James English but in at least three ancient languages; and not originally written but rather passed down orally for generations. It should go without saying, then, that translating a collection of ancient […]
The Trump Effect
I’ve refrained from commenting directly on the 2016 presidential campaign, but I feel the need to share a new publication from an extremely important organization that I have supported for years, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Our schoolchildren are being greatly affected by the rhetoric of the election, and I encourage everyone to read The […]
Abortion and the Paranormal Evidence
Abortion is often in the news, but it has reappeared again lately in three guises: the controversy around Planned Parenthood and the supposed sale of fetal tissue, the violent attacks and murders in a Colorado Planned Parenthood facility by an anti-abortion radical, and the comments by GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump that women who have […]
The Ethical Imperative for Making America Better: Learn from our Peer Nations
For physicians, the Hippocratic Oath forms the ethical basis of their practice. Our leaders in Congress take a solemn vow to defend the Constitution of the United States. Law enforcement officials make promises to “serve and protect.” Whether these promises are actually kept or not, the people making them are, in effect, undertaking an ethical imperative […]
Resurrection: What it Is and Isn’t
Resurrection: a good topic for the continuing Easter season in the Christian calendar. (Our Orthodox brothers and sisters will celebrate Easter on May 1st this year.) While Christians think we have a pretty good idea what we mean by resurrection, or at least the resurrection of Jesus, it is actually more complicated than it appears […]
Capital Punishment from the Perspective of the “Other Side”
The United States is one of the few Western industrialized nations that still allows the death penalty. Americans who favor capital punishment justify it for several reasons: someone who commits a heinous crime deserves to die; the death penalty is a deterrent to violent crime; and death is the only punishment that comes close […]
Some Surprises from the Roman Catacombs 3: The Orante in Light of the Prehistoric Goddess
The prehistoric goddess, the Orante, and the catacombs – now we can begin to reinterpret the pervasive religious symbol of the Orante in the context of nature symbols and the “mother earth” of the Roman catacombs. First, many, if not most, of the symbols used in catacomb art were not purely decorative. Much of it held […]
Some Surprises from the Roman Catacombs 2: Traditional Interpretations of the Orante
The Orante – who was she in the context of pagan, Jewish and early Christian art, and what was she doing in the catacombs? In our last post, we noted a number of religious symbols in the catacombs that indicated a reverence for the prehistoric nature goddess. One of the symbols is the Orante or […]