Ryan Lizza has written a thoroughly unflattering article about Michele Bachmann for The New Yorker titled “Leap of Faith: The Making of a Republican Front-runner.” The article takes a close look at her Christianity as a key to understanding her candidacy. He writes: Bachmann belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians. Her campaign is going to be a conversation about a set of beliefs more extreme than those of any American politician of her stature, including Sarah Palin, to whom she is inevitably compared. Christian readers will be interested…
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Governor Rick Perry’s Speech at “The Response”
Perhaps you heard the news about a giant prayer gathering in Houston, Texas yesterday called “The Response.” About 25,000 people gathered to pray and to hear messages from a variety of different speakers. One of the speakers was Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is expected to announce his candidacy for U.S. President by the end of the month.
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JFK Weighs-in on the United States’ Budget Deficit
I have been reading Robert Dallek’s magisterial biography of John F. Kennedy and came across an item of great contemporary relevance. Among the interesting facts about President Kennedy was his “fiscal conservatism.” He did not fit the caricature of the big spending liberal. In fact, he had a certain antipathy toward FDR not only for his “New Deal” programs, but also because he thought FDR had appeased Stalin during World War II. In any case, as a Congressman JFK openly opposed “unbalanced budgets,” which he perceived to be a threat not only to the economy but also to national security. From Dallek’s biography:
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Bart Ehrman Strikes Again
Bart Ehrman is out promoting his most recent book Forged: Writing in the Name of God–Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are. As with his previous popular books, Ehrman is on a mission. He is doing everything he can to undermine the reader’s confidence in the truthfulness and the authority of scripture. In Forged, he attacks the apostolic authorship of the New Testament. Responses to Ehrman are already appearing. Dan Wallace has written a three-part review that is very helpful, and I encourage you to read it here: part 1, part 2, part 3. Wallace concludes with this:
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When Jon Stewart Cried on TV
We are approaching the 10th anniversary of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and our country will be marking the date with a variety of special observances. We will all have occasion to remember the horror of that day and what life was like in the United States in the immediate aftermath.
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Are There Errors in the Bible?
Albert Mohler just highlighted an important article by Greg Beale on inerrancy. The article appears in The Westminster Theological Journal and is titled “Can the Bible Be Completely Inspired by God and Yet Still Contain Errors? A Response to Some Recent ‘Evangelical’ Proposals.” Here’s the problem Beale seeks to address in this article: Recent writers have especially questioned the traditional understanding of inerrancy. In particular, a central idea underlying inerrancy has been that since God is true and without error and, therefore, his oral word is true and without error, consequently, his word in Scripture is true and without error.
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Alan Wisdom on Immigration Reform
I think Alan Wisdom’s analysis of the contentious immigration debate is well worth the read. Writing for The Institute on Religion & Democracy, he advocates for no specific policy. He merely lists items that citizens (in particular Christian citizens) ought to take into account when considering competing proposals for immigration reform. He writes:
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What must you have in your dorm room this Fall?
I am a college professor, so I do pay some attention to all the back-to-school kinds of articles that get published this time of year. I came across one this morning that was a little strange. MSNBC.com has a list of “top essentials” that every college student must have in his dorm room this Fall. Color me unconvinced. It seems to me that this list is mainly composed of luxury items while leaving out actual essential items (e.g., laptop computer). I wonder if you agree. Here’s the list with my brief remarks on each:
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God in America
If you missed PBS’s “God in America” series last Fall, you can now watch it online for free. You can stream it from PBS’s website, or you can watch all six episodes below. Here’s a description of the program: For the first time on television, God in America explores the tumultuous 400-year history of the intersection of religion and public life in America, from the first European settlements to the 2008 presidential election.
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Why I Use BibleWorks
Students often ask me about the Bible software that I use during class. The program that I display to them nearly every day is BibleWorks8. Here is why. For many years, the Accordance software was the gold standard for scholars and pastors working with the primary texts of biblical studies. Its main drawback was that it only worked on Macs, thus relegating the myriads of PC users to one or more of the inferior programs that were available for the Windows operating system. The release of BibleWorks 5 and 6 began to close the gap between Mac users and PC users. With the release of BibleWorks 7 and 8, however,…