CCBlogs thinking critically, living faithfully

James McGrath's blog

Academic discussions of the subject of the place of Jesus' birth has been spreading Christmas cheer throughout the biblioblogosphere. Mark Goodacre's podcast started it off, and Doug Chaplin, +Wrong and I all responded in different ways. The +Wrong discussion is particularly interesting since it offered examples of individuals who became known as "NAME 0f PLACE" where the place was not where they were born; to which Steph responded by pointing out that in such cases the place they were associated with was a place they became famous, and it is not clear that "Jesus of Nazareth" fits that category. (An example that comes to mind from a later time is Rumi).

Historians are understandably skeptical and must consider the possibility that Jesus was associated with Bethlehem later. Because of the joint convictions that (a) Jesus was the Messiah, and (b) the Messiah has to come from Bethlehem, some Christians could well have drawn the conclusion that Jesus must have been from Bethlehem.... READ MORE.

James McGrath's blog

I have a question for professors, students, former students and other people with opinions on this subject. If you've taught a one-semester course on the whole Bible, did you get students to read the whole Bible, or just some select passages? In the past I've done the latter, and I'm inclined to stick with that approach, since I'm afraid that any attempt to read the whole thing would involve much more skimming and much less attention to detail, resulting in even less comprehension. But when one excerpts, inevitably one gives the "greatest hits" and makes judgments about what passages are most important to read, something I'd in an ideal case prefer to let the students do for themselves instead.

What do you think? .... READ MORE.

James McGrath's blog

It has been far too long since I've posted on the subject of intelligent design, but I was inspired by Eric Reitan's recent post to comment on the arena into which ID seems to be turning its attention, namely the soul and mind-body dualism.

The whole method of intelligent design seems to be reducible to a simple two-step procedure:

1) Find something science allegedly cannot explain in principle;

2) Appeal to 'intelligent design' as the one size fits all 'explanation' for the phenomenon in step 1.

When it comes to consciousness, cdesign proponentsists might seem to be on safer terrain than the bacterial flagellum or the immune system, since consciousness represents the 'hard problem' and it is likely to remain a mystery for many years to come.

But in actual fact, intelligent design's approach to this subject rests on a category mistake..... READ MORE.

James McGrath's blog

Today marked the second (and final, although I'm not sure anything in my class is really "final") of my Sunday school classes on Islam. We also touched on a number of key points about Baptist identity, which will make for a nice segue into what happens next: I'm going to take a break from teaching my class for the summer, while our pastor offers a summer Sunday school class on "Being Baptist". I'll be attending his class for its duration, along with as many of the other regular attendees in my own class as wish to.

In today's class, I went over the five pillars of Islam, but also emphasized that doing so no more gives a real sense of what Islam means to its followers, than learning some creeds or even reading the Bible would give an impression of what Christianity is.... READ MORE.