Last night, the media reported the first indictment of a former U.S. president on criminal charges  The next few days will be the:



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Two Stories: a Christian Bible and a Jewish Magazine that Make for Bad Religion

Image
"Here I stand: I can do no otherwise: God help me!" -M. Luther image: Wikipedia This post has evolved, over a number of weeks, into a morass of a critique, taking on two venerable and very different foundational literary establishments, the King James Bible and the popular religious press.  It might seem quite unwieldy to make critical judgments about these two things in the same place at the same time but read on, perhaps the focus will sharpen.  We will tiptoe around theology and scholarship, in hopes that we trample neither but that our own footsteps are rightly placed between those two towering hedges. Since my most recent post,  (https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/1797607806021886628/3655238780916104218), regarding the mistranslation of a verse in Isaiah which caused a theological storm of invectives, lies, accusations, and a highly un-Christian (at least in the name) level of violence which would seem to be quite excessive until we consider that the question raised
Read more

Who Wrote the Bible Anyway?

Image
  Image: Our Savior Lutheran Church I suppose that most of us who attended Sunday School or Hebrew School as children at some point wondered who actually wrote the books that were compiled into what we refer to as The Bible.  I do not remember much about what we were taught but have a vague recollection that we were taught that Moses wrote the Old Testament, that the disciples, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the Gospels, and the Apostle Paul wrote the Epistles.  It was pretty simple.   Image:  Amazon There were many Bible-story books and some pretty good stories.  None of the chronology or geography came into the picture, however.  It seems that the adults did not think it was important or more likely that they had no idea about these things. If you start asking too many questions, Sunday School teachers get very nervous.  I suppose I was an adult when I first seriously asked myself who actually wrote these books and how they were put together. The answers were enlightening. For t
Read more
Image
This post contains the preface to the book I am working on.  I will publish other parts as we go.  AL L comments are appreciated. Please note that I do not defend nor debate my opinions.     When I was in the fifth grade, a girl named Norma sat next to me in band.   She was the only other tenor sax player in the grade school band, so we were probably destined to become either friends or enemies.   A cautious friendship/rivalry began to emerge since we were not comfortable with those other two choices.   We fought like brothers and sisters but we never really meant to be mean and we truly had mutual respect and affection.   There was nothing especially remarkable about Norma.   She was pretty, thin, and loud, and at that age, all knees and elbows and teeth.   The most distinguishing thing about her in my mind was that she was Jewish.   Far a ten-year-old Alabama boy who, in 1959, had been transported from the less-than-modern thinking of my home state of Alabama to an experimental
Read more