Historian of Religion, Science, and Biblical Interpretation
I’ve plugged Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) before, a great magazine (with pictures!) aimed at laypeople interested in the history, text, interpretation, and archaeology of the Bible. (Notably, there are some LDS in there from time to time!) It’s scholarly but accessible, includes multiple perspectives, and the letters to the editor are illustrative and amusing. Worth subscribing to. Continue reading
This is one of a series of seasonal posts I put up every year.
When the mission president announced to our small group of greenies that I was going to Strasbourg, on France’s eastern border, I shrugged the resigned shrug of a missionary who knew nothing about anywhere but was willing to go wherever. One of the sisters expressed jealousy; Strasbourg, she said, was one of the best cities in the mission.
She was right, and it would not be a good thing. Continue reading
Logos does a free book and some other sales every month. They’re launching a new version of the program sometime in September, so the sales right now are interesting. A few things I tend to recommend. These end in a week.
Lots of big announcements, lots of good things happening, some things… coming to an end.
I first started graduate school in September of 2001 at the University of Chicago, with courses in Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian. Life gave me some real detours, and now 23 years later, in a completely different discipline, but drawing on my six years of training in the languages and literature of the ancient Near East, my doctoral dissertation is nearly complete. I’m sending off final revisions to my advisor, to get approval to send it out to my doctoral committee, with a defense in late June or July.
I will graduate and become Doctor Spackman.
The dissertation title is “The Scientist is Wrong”: Joseph Fielding Smith, George McCready Price, and the Ascendency of Creationist Thought among Latter-day Saints in the Twentieth Century.
Two more! These also will be added to my media page, when I have time.
I haven’t added these to the Media page yet, but will soon. And more is coming!
Gustav Doré’s Destruction of Leviathan
Well, the end is upon us. It’s the end of the world/New Testament/year as we know it, and I feel fine.
Today’s chapters… today’s chapters, well. Let’s be blunt. If you pick up a commentary from a believing scholar who has spent his/her entire life studying Revelation, they are likely to admit that no one has any real clue. Just about every passage is disputed in some way by somebody. I am skeptical of the lesson manual’s ability to navigate us through this material, and I’m not about to hold myself out as any expert. Revelation to me is like Isaiah in the Old Testament; I’ve just never really had any particular interest. So, apologies to anyone who came to today’s post looking for the keys to unlock the universe. These chapters contain a lot of things that sound familiar, and a lot of things that sound crazy. Be prepared for lots of potentially crazy comments and wild doctrinal inferences. This is fertile ground, historically speaking, for rampant speculation.
As we read through the two letters of Peter, readers may encounter a famous line, ” one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” (2 Pe 3:8). So… let’s talk about that line and the days of Genesis.
Update 11-01-2023: Barring technical issues, this will be recorded and uploaded to YouTube!
Nov 5 at 7Pm in Phoenix, I will give a fireside on “Reading Scripture as a Disciple and a Scholar: How Disciple-Scholarship Can Build Faith.” I’ll discuss the different goals and methods of these ways of reading, and offer some good examples from scripture of what reading as a scholar can get us, and also… how to read like a scholar while NOT being a scholar 🙂
You can download a flier here with more details and address.
Hope to see you there.
Ezra lived in the Israelite “post-apocalyptic” period. The glorious kingdom was gone, the city of Jerusalem and its Temple destroyed, the Davidic line lost, God’s chosen people had been hauled to Babylon, and only a small remnant returned to try to rebuild the Temple. Ezra believed that these events were to due Israelite infidelity to the covenants they had made. Setting aside what those commandments were, Ezra’s prayer in chapter 9 strikes me as a model of how we should come before the Lord “with fear and trembling.” Continue reading
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