I’m in London for a bit just now, as is my summer wont, currently enjoying the heatwave (96 degrees without air conditioning!), as all you other London and thereabouts residents are!  But this too shall pass.  And so.... I would love to have a blog dinner in central London with anyone who can make it, hopefully in cooler conditions, on the evening of Wednesday July 15.  Would you be interested? I’ll probably start around 6:00 or so for a pint with whomever is interested in quenching thirst before satisfying hunger, and then head over to dinner at 7:00 or so.  Location TBD -- but somewhere relatively interesting and easy to get to. You interested?  My plan is to limit the table to 10.   For those who come there are no obligations other than: Being a blog member Showing up Talking Paying for whatever you ingest.  (Whatever you exgest is free.) If you’d like to join me and a group of other blog members for an evening of interesting discussion of areas of mutual [...]

One of the emails I get *all* the time is from authors who have written a book, or hope to write a book, who want to know how they can get a publisher to take a look at it.   The short answer: it ain’t easy.  Often the inquiry comes from someone who wants to publish a book for scholars to convince them to take a different view on a matter of scholarly importance.  How does a someone get a publisher to publish a book like that? People don't like to hear this, but if you don't already have scholarly credentials an academic publisher will almost certainly (or at least extremely rarely) even consider your manuscript.  And having the credentials, for a first-time author, almost always means having done advanced graduate level education in the field. I know a lot of authors who think that it’s not fair that they can’t get their books published “just because I don’t have a PhD.”   It get that -- it must be hugely frustrating.  But the problem is that [...]

Some of you have probably had this same experience.  Now that I'm 70, I'm thinking about my past a lot more than ... in the past.  The other day I was thinking about my life in high school soon after I had become a born-again Christian (an incredibly ignorant born-again Christian).  One incident quickly came to mind. Before I became a gung-ho Christian, my first serious girlfriend was Linda, whom I met when we were starting our sophomore year in high school.  She was funny, personable, attractive, intelligent, and Jewish.  I’m not sure I had ever known a Jewish person before her. Now I don’t recall that we ever talked about religion, and looking back  I suppose it’s not particularly surprising.  She and her family  certainly weren’t observant Jews and my uninformed sense is that they were completely secular.  I don’t know if they went to synagogue or kept any of the holidays, but I kind-a doubt it.  In any event, at that point in my life religion wasn’t really my main concern [...]

Isn’t atheism an extreme position to take?  If you (or, well, I) give up believe in the Christian God we were (I was) raised on, why give up on the idea of any god entirely? I’m on a trip giving lectures to a group of folks who, well, want to see Norway (!) but also want to discuss issues closely related to what we do on the Blog – questions about the New Testament, the historical Jesus, early Christianity, related topics in religion, and questions about religion in general.  It’s a great group with people of a wide range of backgrounds and lots of interesting stories. Already we have discussed lots of interesting things, and one of my fellow travelers has pushed me on why I became an atheist.  They agree that there are real problems with believing in an all-loving and all-powerful God who wants humans to thrive, be happy, be content with life, and who is certainly able to make that happen for everyone if he chooses (even if there does [...]

I'm with a group of travelers just now who are interested in critical approaches to the Bible (not views that are criticizing per se, but views that approach the Bible using historical methods -- "Biblical Criticism").  One of them - as usually happens - has asked me about the very popular writings of John Shelby Spong, who was an unusual figure in numerous ways, most famously because he was both highly skeptical about the reliability of the New Testament AND a long-time bishop in the Episcopal church.  How does that work? Well, work it did.  He had a deservedly huge following. Years ago I posted comments on a book he wrote near the end of his career on the Gospel of John, which takes an even more skeptical view of its reliability than I do.  But I realized I should first set the context for those of you who don't know who he was by re-posting my "Memorium" for him written soon after he died.  So here is that first, then my summary/discussion of his [...]

In my previous post I gave a brief overview of the doctrine of predestination, especially as developed by the great 16th century Protestant Reformer John Calvin and his followers.  I ended the post by indicating – surely this is a surprise for many people – that one of the most interesting and formative understandings of modern capitalism is that its has it can be traced back in its origins to Protestant views of predestination.  How does that work exactly? The key text is Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (NY: Scribner, 1958; German original, 1920).  Weber (= VEY-ber) was an important German intellectual often credited as being the founder of modern Sociology as an academic discipline. He begins his book with an intriguing question about modern economic systems that, till then, had never posed: why [in his time, the early 20th century] are there more capitalist ventures, capitalists, and trained capitalist laborers in Protestant countries than in Catholic ones?  And in countries of mixed populations, why are there [...]