My favorite funny R&S post of 2011
So many good things have been written this year about the sometimes-contentious, sometimes-mind-expanding, sometimes-hopeful relationship between science & religion. But there’s humor too, and the best funny thing I saw all year may be this strip. I found it at James McGrath’s Patheos blog, Exploring Our Matrix, but it has been featured by PZ Myers and [...]
Flannery O’Connor and the end of all things
Barry Moser, Flannery O’Connor (detail). Wood engraving. See the original at moser-pennyroyal.com. Used with permission of the artist The First Sunday of Advent. That was yesterday. And what a Sunday it was. Julie’s sermon was taken from Malachi. Malachi! Can you imagine?! I almost fell over when I saw that. The passage (3.1-3) reads, See, [...]
The magnificent defeat
Jack Baumgartner, Jacob Wrestling the Angel of the Lord (2010). Used by permission of the artist The same night he got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he [...]
Theology gone bad
Clarence Larkin, Book of Revelation, 1919. Click on the image for a high-resolution (3 MB) version. Amazing, isn’t it? It’s a much nicer presentation that the one I was offered in Sunday school when I was 11, but it has a lot of the same general features. Although Rev. Larkin was by all accounts a [...]
Mind the gaps
Illumination from the Codex Aemilianensis, 992. In the tenth century we had no reason to suspect Adam and Eve had not been actual people. Now we do. Image source: University of Florida God lives in the gaps. And the gaps must be getting downright cozy for God. The God of the gaps fallacy runs deep. [...]
Job redux: Loss and the glory of the world meet in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life
Sean Penn as Jack in Terrence Malick‘s The Tree of Life. Penn works his world-weary visage to great effect in the film Don’t worry, there are no spoilers here. In fact, I’m having a hard time even imagining a spoiler for this film. I could tell you the whole thing and it wouldn’t change its [...]
Keep your eye on the story
As Scott at Scotteriology says, this must be what drove Noah to drink after the flood. WARNING Part 1 (above) is fantastic but Part 2 gets really tedious and features some harsh language Henry, my 11-year-old son, has a new hobby: magic. He’s getting pretty good at it, too. Whenever I take our toddler out [...]
Big Head Todd and the mass extinction problem
Todd Park Mohr of Big Head Todd and the Monsters recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis. I missed BHTM back in the 1990′s when they had their major-scale success; I blame graduate school for this. But a good friend introduced them to me several years ago and to this day I am grateful to him [...]
Meet the new conspiracy
The phases of Venus as photographed in 2002 by Chris Proctor at the Torquay Boys’ Grammar School Observartory in Devon, England. It was Galileo’s observations of Venus’s phases that most powerfully argued against the ancient geocentric system of the Greek astronomer Ptolemy. Galileo’s observations did not convince anyone of the truth of the Copernican system, [...]
Worldwide arks!
A full-scale replica of Giraffa camelopardalis peers out from the deck of a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark. This particular replica (of the ark, not the giraffe) is being built by Johan Huibers of Dordrecht, the Netherlands. Photo: Michel de Groot/The New York Times Just yesterday, the New York Times posted an article about a [...]
