The Pokey Finger of God

The purpose of this blog is to capture my meanderings and ruminations regarding religion and culture. I flatter myself that someday some parts of it may become a book. The bulk of these posts were originally posted on my Live Journal blog, which I started as a means to keep a practice of prose writing. [...]

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I’m beginning to accumulate an unwieldy quantity of historical Jesuses. Less useful in that I’ve moved to a primary narrative that leaves Jesus out altogether. Even so, in the absence of an actual, historical Jesus, we may still create a number of literary Jesuses, each distinct and beloved, and required for generational continuity of the [...]

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I’m enjoying the Marvin Vining book, Jesus the Wicked Priest, but not because I agree with his conclusions. In fact, the more I read, the further removed I become from agreement. He’s another armchair archaeologist, so I feel a certain kinship with him. This despite the fact that the guy has to go through some [...]

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My recent flirting with a regular weight-training regimen has begun to produce noticeable results, almost despite my inability to keep to a schedule. My body feels better and my yoga is better when I keep the discipline of practice.
It reminds me of the benefits I would get with regular meditation practice. Again, discipline with regular [...]

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Here’s a site that offers a unique, hi-res view of daVinci’s Last Supper. Very useful if you’re caught into a controversy regarding the gender of the ‘beloved apostle’ or the owner of the knife.

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The latest issue of BAR revisits the much hyped Gospel of Judas, and has some unkind words for National Geographic and their media-heavy release of the original material. The biggest complaint was that they picked the wrong scholars who didn’t understand Gnostic cultures and misinterpreted key passages of the text. Most significantly, NatlGeo published an [...]

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