Here is another selection from the draft of my book, which, at this still early point, I am calling The Origins of Altruism: How the Teachings of Jesus Transformed the Moral Conscience of the West.  This bit is the introduction to my chapter 6, which deals with how the early Christians began to change and soften Jesus' ethical teaching soon after his death.I'm calling the chapter:  "Transforming the Ethics of Jesus: Moral Discourse in Early Christianity.' Let me know what you think. ****************************** Many codes of human ethics are widely shared across time periods and cultures and yet so many others are surprisingly disparate.  That is hard to explain if we were all granted our moral compass from a power on high, but it makes perfect sense given evolutionary and social pressures.   Our overarching “code” has developed over millions of years of evolution; but significant variations occur because humans have evolved in myriad different environments and cultures.  The basic code makes sense to nearly all of us because in order to survive in virtually every [...]

When teaching undergraduate students about the problem of suffering, I have sometimes found it hard to explain to them why it is a “problem” for those who believe in God.  Many people do not find it an insurmountable problem; many others do.  My concern is far less where someone lines up on that issue than on that they realize it is indeed a huge issue that should not be ignored or swept under a rug. It took a while for some of my students at Rutgers to see the problem years ago when I was teaching about it, as I mentioned in my last post.  I continue my reflections here.  Again, this is excerpted from my book God’s Problem (HarperOne, 2008), edited a bit. ****************************** Before the semester was over, I think my students got the point. Most of them did learn to grapple with the problem. At the beginning of the course, many of them had thought that whatever problem there was with suffering could be fairly easily solved. The most popular [...]

This is the second guest post by Judy Siker, who explained in her previous post about her upbringing as a Christian in the South and then her move into the academic study of the Bible from a critical perspective.  If you recall, Judy was my student in the (very secular!) graduate program in New Testament/Early Christianity here at UNC, where she did both a Masters and PhD in the field, focusing, in her dissertation, on the socio-historical background to the Gospel of Matthew, in particular as that involved the relations of Jews and Christians in the author's community.   She then had a rich and varied teaching career in a range of schools -- private liberal arts, Catholic university, and Baptist seminary, among them! In this follow up post Judy lays out her understanding of what the Bible is (among other things, a book that asks compelling questions about matters of faith) and is not (a book that gives us all the incontrovertible answers), partly in response to comments and questions she received.  She is willing [...]

Aren't critical scholars of the NT more or less bound or driven to stop believing?  I've decided to provide two reposts on the question, since I continually get asked about it.   First: my introduction to the issue and the guest poster. ****************************** One of the questions I get asked the most frequently from blog members is how someone can possibly continue to be a believing Christian if they understand the enormous problems presented by the critical study of the New Testament.  I always tell them that in fact it’s not only possible – it happens all the time.  Sometimes they are incredulous, but it’s not only true, it’s so true that my friends who know everything I know about the Bible and are still believers often find the question / issue completely puzzling.  They have trouble understanding why anyone thinks it’s a problem.  As we learned from "Cool Hand Luke" (a great movie, btw, with tons of Christ-images), “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” I have asked my former student and long-time [...]

In my book on altruism (yet to be finished!), I'm thinking about including the following as a way to begin reflecting on the question of whether anything like "pure" altruism exists (where someone acts entirely for the sake of another with no benefit at all for the self).  Let me know your thoughts. ****************************** One might think that “altruism” is a non-problematic term.  It comes from the Latin word “alter” which means “other,"  and so refers broadly to actions that benefit someone other than oneself.  It stands in contrast with “egoism,” based on the Greek word “ego,” meaning “I” or “myself,” and therefore referring to actions that benefit oneself. That all seems simple enough: the terms differentiate between doing things for others and doing things for ourselves.  But it turns out that in practice it is difficult – possibly impossible – to establish clear boundaries between altruism and egoism.  As a result, philosophers, psychologists, and evolutionary biologists perennially debate how to understand the terms. I’ll illustrate the problem by telling a strange personal anecdote. Did [...]

I think a lot about significance these days, about why we, or rather, why I, matter.  I mean really, this universe is 13.8 billion years old and I’ve been around for, well, 68 of those years and certainly won’t be around for another 68.  So, for how much of time to this point?  Do the math. Then there’s the space factor.  I’m a small dot in my house; my house is a small dot in my neighborhood; my neighborhood is a small dot in my city; my city is a small dot in my state; my state is a not-large dot in the country; the country is a not-large dot on the planet; our planet is a tiny dot in the solar system; the solar system is an infinitesimal dot in the galaxy of some 100 billion stars; our galaxy is an an even more infinitesimal dot in a universe of maybe 2 trillion galaxies.  And the universe itself?  Who knows if there is a multiverse? Where does that leave me?  Tiny doesn’t [...]

Here I continue some of my discussion of my involvement with the New Revised Standard Translation, not as one of the translators (I was still a graduate student) but as a behind the scenes helper and research grunt.  I start this post with a bit of autobiography and end with issues of translations. I have mentioned that I started out as a “secretary” for the  committee when they were meeting twice a year to make decisions for the new translation, recording the decisions they made for changing the older Revised Standard Version translation.  I did that for several years until they had finished their translation.  I graduated from my PhD program in 1985, and I was already, at that point, teaching at Rutgers University. My position at Rutgers was a rather precarious one, professionally.  In the language almost universally used today, I was an “adjunct” instructor, that is, a temporary faculty member without full (or much of any) benefits and paid as part time, even though I was teaching the full load of courses (with [...]