The Pokey Finger of God

In response to Damon Linker’s essay Why do so many liberals despise Christianity?: First off, it’s ludicrous to posit that all, or even many, liberals hate Christianity, simply because there are so many liberal Christians. From what I can tell, for every annoying, conservative, evangelical Christian, there are two liberal, mainstream Christians who simply don’t […]

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Recently, conservative media darling Bill O’Reilly wrote a book called Killing Jesus. Normally, such an event would go unremarked by me, but there was an awesome review of the book on Salon that I really got a kick out of. Richard Price starts out by propping up his conservative bonefides, insisting that he is actually […]

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One of my favorite myths of the “Early Church” has top billing in this new book by Candida Moss. I discussed this in some detail in my book, Janus in Nicea, but it was less of a key point than a reinforcing element. In retrospect, this is a better topic for public discussion as it […]

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Some Pentacostal Evangelicals have their panties in a knot about some translations of the Bible Wycliffe has made for Muslim cultures. Read the news article here. The complaint is that “language in some of their translations intended for Muslim countries misses the essential Christian idea of Trinity: the father, son and the holy spirit or […]

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Normally, this is a topic I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. I also don’t get into arguments with people who claim the world is flat, doomed to end, or cursed by demons. It’s simply not worth the bother: folks don’t come to these conclusions through logic, so logic isn’t going to dislodge them. Evolution, […]

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Quite a milestone was reached last week when I published my book, Janus in Nicea.  I had started this blog some years ago when I realized that the state of my study of Early Church history was such that it needed a home away from Live Journal. After continued work in it, I received a […]

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Here’s something I’ve enjoyed greatly this last week: Stephen Williams’ Diocletian and the Roman Recovery. This book from 1985 was apparently one of the first biographies of the man written in English. The genius here is the clear and concise comparison between the Empire under the “Good Emperors” and the Empire under “Crisis”. Williams provides […]

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Recently, I have enjoyed Death and the Emperor by Penelope J.E. Davies. Dr. Davies teaches Roman art and architecture at UT Austin, and is apparently working on a book focusing on the Republic[1]. This study of the purpose and meaning of a variety of the funerary remains of the great Roman emperors. This work is […]

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I just got pointed to P.R.F. Brown’s amazing site. He has posted quite a bit of research to his site — including a few projects I had started myself and am right glad I don’t have to finish them, now, like the list of all known writers in the ancient Western world, categorized and dated. […]

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Dobson and Minnery accused Obama of having minority, if not crackpot, opinions about the Bible. They indicated several times that they felt he was not qualified to interpret the Bible. They wailed and gnashed their teeth at the wonton destruction laid bare by Barack’s unauthorized lay-opining. Oh, will the nation ever repair from this grievous wound? Then they changed the subject and repeated the process.

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