Last night I hosted a dinner here on my home-turf of Durham NC.   If you recall, I put out an invitation about a month ago and limited the table to six of us.  I was most impressed with my dining companions.  Most of them came from out of town for the occasion, as far away as Pittsburgh and Dallas.  Amazing.  We had a fantastic time and it was great getting to meet members of the blog and hearing their varied and intriguing life stories.    I am planning on doing this sort of thing more, not just here where I live, but in various places that I will be for speaking engagements in the months that lie ahead. Everyone at dinner had things they wanted to talk about – and so did I!  My main question was how we could improve the blog and do so in a way that would generate more income for the charities it supports.   Over the five and a half years I have been doing the blog, I have never made [...]

This week’s Reader’s Mailbag is not about a specific question I have been asked once but about a general question I get asked a lot.  People have indicated several times they would like to have more information about the charities we support on the blog, and so I thought it was time to explain that again (I’ve done it only a couple of times over the years.) So when I started the blog in 2012, I set up a non-profit foundation, The Bart Ehrman Foundation, whose sole purpose is to collect the moneys raised by the blog and distribute the moneys to charity.   Any donations to the blog are fully tax deductible.   When I set the Foundation up, I expected we would raise something like $20,000 a year.  Woops.  Bad estimate.   To date we have distributed $339,000 in funds to charities.  Each year (until, alas, this one it appears!  L) we have raised significantly more than the year previous.  Last year (my fiscal year runs April 1-March 31, because of when I started the blog) [...]