May 2010
5 posts
Searching for Jesus in the Gospels: newyorker.com →
Really great piece!  Gopnick has done a nice job of summarizing NT criticism as well as the problem/fun of “the historical Jesus.”  He gets some of the facts wrong and perhaps oversimplifies some debated material, but in a popular publication it is nice to see anything beyond N. T. Wright dribble.
May 24th
Dies Solis / Dies Pigritiae
It’s a rainy Sunday and nothing could more epitomize rest.  I’m so declined on the couch sipping my tea that some might say I’m lying down. I prefer to imagine myself as a Roman aristocrat in his triclinium.  Why though do I have the luxury of a lazy Sunday? Almost everyone knows why Sunday is the day of rest; most know that labor activists in the nineteenth century agitated for...
May 23rd
De Amicitia et Itineribus:
I spent the weekend travelling across the country, leaving the negotium of  North Carolina for a weekend of otium by the bay.  No, I did not find myself sipping vino a Napoli, but the San Francisco bay is a close second (actually, it was Mimosas in Dolores Park).  I may have been physically in California, but in a more abstract sense, I was in a different state: I spent the weekend nestled in...
May 18th
4 tags
Mine and Duke's Ghosts
I’ve been thinking a lot about the soul lately, not so much about my soul, but about the staying power of the concept.  More or less, all the religions from the axial age onwards(basically from the age of Plato, Buddha and Jesus) have some idea of a self that is not corporeal, but nevertheless a part of person.  This part, really essence, in most traditions exists on after shedding its...
May 14th
3 tags
Monica’s Fibbing Child, or Augustine Redux
I recently ran across an interesting news article about Liberty University’s seminary dean in The Huffington Post’s college section—the story brought together two topics which I love to research and occasionally skewer, namely religion and higher education, so I couldn’t resist reading about the scandal in Lynchburg, Va. Here’s the gist: Everyone loves a good conversion story and so did the...
May 13th