This is now my 40th year of teaching at a university, 36 of the years at UNC Chapel Hill and 4 before that at Rutgers as a 28 year old.  It very nearly didn't happen at all.  Life is so strange. I was on the job market while I was writing my dissertation.. And even though there were job openings, I couldn’t get an interview to save my soul. Part of the problem was that my PhD was from a theological seminary, and a lot of the jobs were at secular institutions – state universities, private colleges, and the like. Most places simply don’t want to take a chance on someone who has been trained in a theological environment. Especially someone like me at the time. I had never set foot in a secular setting since high school! Starting when I was 17, I was at Moody Bible Institute (3 years), (Christian evangelical) Wheaton College (2 years), and then (Presbyterian ministerial training ground) Princeton Theological Seminary (7 years). Yikes! Even theological schools and Christian colleges [...]

I sometimes feel like a pestiferous terrier who goes after someone’s ankles and just won’t stop. There are some issues (among the “Big Questions”) that I repeatedly come back to and just can’t let drop.  I suppose that’s because they seem both really important and completely incapable of being figured out.  Hence my occasional return to them on the blog. I’ve mentioned before that I have a daily meditation practice, which does wonders for my stress levels and mental/emotional/psychological well-being, though it does sometimes leave me puzzled..  This morning I did one of those “go deep into your mind” sessions where you just dig deep into your conscience and try to understand who/what you are as a living being. As often happens when I do that, I once more again came up against the issue of what “I” can possibly be. I feel like “I” am somehow located in my brain.  And I don’t think that “I” will exist once my brain (along with the rest of my body) dies, since it’s quite [...]

Was Jesus’ birth meant to bring peace into the world? One of my favorite Christmas carols is Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,[i] which includes among its memorable lines, “Hail the heaven-born Prince of Peace, Hail the Sun of Righteousness.”  The carol is celebrating the announcement of Jesus’ birth to the shepherds “in the fields by night” in Luke 2:  13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, 14 “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!” Without saying it, Luke is telling his readers that the birth of Jesus was a fulfillment of prophecy.  Throughout Luke’s account of Jesus he alludes to prophecies of Scripture without drawing specific attention to them (unlike Matthew, who is constantly saying that such and such happened “in order to fulfill what the prophet said….”).  In this case he is making a clear allusion to Isaiah chapter 9, more familiar to most people today from Handel’s Messiah: 1 The people who walked [...]

For a long time I’ve thought a lot about time.  Usually about how I don’t have enough of it, how I wish I had more of it, how I can use what I have most efficiently, how I can possibly get done what I have to do and … And, over the past couple of years, I’ve begun to think more about how all that (on one level) is nonsense and just creates anxiety and stress. My change began when someone (urgently) recommended me to read Paul Loomans' book Time Surfing (easily available to purchase online).  I wasn’t sure about it at first, just lookin’ at the cover.  But oh my god.  I read it three times and it started a revolution in my brain, that continues and has made the most enormous difference, not so much in how I fill my days, hours, and minutes (in my case, time-obsessive guy that I am, and seconds…) but about my emotional approach and attitude toward what I do and the time I have to do it. [...]

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 [...]