Embarrassing but predicatable: once again, the atheists make us Christians look like morons. Is there a lesson here?
Michelangelo‘s Creation of Adam with a significant 21st-century alteration. Can you find it? Source: www.fotodiario2.it Well, friends, it has happened just as we knew it would: They performed a survey of basic religious knowledge, “they” being the Pew Forum on Religion & Life — and we nice church persons didn’t do so well. In fact, [...]
Sanity is not all that
Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), Self-Portraits, 1887. Pen and ink, graphite on wove paper. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Van Gogh is perhaps the canonical example of the mad artist. He did indeed have a difficult life. Whatever one may say about his mental health, however, he produced some of the most critically acclaimed works of art [...]
Fear of a Muslim planet
The POTUS and FLOTUS celebrate their takeover of the world with a nice interspouse fist bump. The cover of The New Yorker, 21 July 2008. By Barry Blitt. Perhaps my Jordanian friend had seen this cover and missed the satire One of the delightful things about attending seminary is that you are made to do [...]
La Pietà and the cosmos
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, La Pietà (detail), 1499 I have just come out of what was perhaps the most inspiring lecture I have ever attended. You have no idea how amazing it was. Believe it or not, it was about Michelangelo‘s La Pietà and the cosmos. It was also about John Calvin. It was [...]
Christine O’Donnell: what is truth?
Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Before Pilate, c. 1520. Jesus talked about the truth, but Pilate wouldn’t have it. Instead, he washed his hands of the affair, asked What is truth? and promptly subjugated truth to politics. We sigh: There is nothing new under the sun. Source: Wikimedia Commons Politics does not make a big splash at [...]
What’s out there? Does it matter?
A remarkable 360° panorama of the late spring sky over Death Valley. We didn’t need an amazingly expensive federally-funded space telescope or manned mission to create this image; the photographer didn’t even use a telescope. Just a decent camera. Click on the image to get a beautiful high-resolution version. Credit: Dan Duriscoe, U.S. National Park [...]
Just for you: a nice science & religion time sink
The so-called Flammarion woodcut shows a medieval pilgrim crawling off the edge of a flat Earth and breaking through the crystalline spheres that were at one time believed to surround us. Since antiquity virtually no educated people have believed the Earth was flat, but scientists continued to debate the physical reality of celestial spheres well [...]
An ash heap with a view
Oldřich Kulhánek, Job No. 1. Lithograph (2002) Let’s talk us some Bible. The Old Testament books of Wisdom are among my favorites in the Christian canon (they are also present in the Hebrew canon). They don’t get heavy into theology like Paul’s letters and they don’t feature a hundred brilliant stories like Exodus. The Wisdom [...]
Hearing the whole concerto
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943). Source: www.sunar.ru It is 1902. You are attending a piano concerto. Imagine it is Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, a personal favorite of ours here at psnt.net, performed by the man himself. But suppose that when the music starts, something sounds wrong; you can’t hear the low tones of [...]
A Muslim approaches the Qur’an and its vilifiers
The first surah, or chapter, of the Qur’an. This chapter is known as Al-Fatiha (“The Opening”). By Turkish calligrapher Hattat Aziz Efendi (1871-1934). Source: Wikimedia Commons So this week I’ve been thinking about that utterly insane pastor in Gainesville, Florida, who thinks that burning a huge stack of Qur’ans is a good way to “send [...]
