My student Kelsey showed me this:
Just thought I’d share.
Author Archive for Dr. JimPage 2 of 6
Rick Mercer Rocks!
For all you non-Canuckians, Rick Mercer is a politically oriented comedian who often takes the PMO (Prime Minister’s Office), and others, to task over assorted silliness.
Hat tip to Playing Chess with Pidgeons for the link
I was going through my blog roll and other links weeding out the out of date or forsaken ones and discovered that Axis Mundi, a peer reviewed journal for Religious Studies students hosted at the University of Alberta is still in business. It went through a rough period with only occasional publications and I stopped visiting it, but it has a number of articles up from 2010 and 2011, some of which would be of great interest to folks in biblical studies. The most recent article is:
- ERÉNDIRA CERVANTES-ALTAMIRANO Recovering the Progressive Spirit of Islam: Ijtihad and Its Transformative Possibilities in Islamic Feminism
There is also a series of articles on Early Christian Communities and Hagiography
- RYAN OLFERT “Food for the Wild Beasts,” or The Very Special Dead: A Conference Panel on Martyrdom in Early Christian Communities
- ANGELA BRKICH-SUTHERLAND The Power and Authority of Perpetua the Proto-Martyr
- RYAN OLFERT Bodies of Suffering: Discourse and Power in the Martyrs of Hagiography
- CHELSEY VARGO Jesters, Jongleurs, Clowns and Other Unsavoury Types:A Review of Benedicta Ward’s Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources. Cistercian Studies Series 106. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1987
Here is the Journal’s blurb:
Axis Mundi is an online journal edited and maintained by Religious Studies students at the University of Alberta. Axis Mundi accepts contributions from students in any year of studies – undergraduate and graduate – in Universities and Colleges across Canada. We encourage submissions pertaining to any aspect of the academic … Continue reading
I’m at it again, haranguing a mob with all my fancy lernin’…
Yup, I will be delivering a NEW AND IMPROVED version of my Calgary C.F.I. paper here in Lethbridge
On the Job of Not Practicing What I Teach.
Some Personal Reflections on Religion, Academia, and the Evil Atheist Conspiracy®
Tuesday, March 27 at 7:00 p.m. in Turcotte Hall on the U of L campus.
And Now the Blurb:
The secular, academic study of religion has always been controversial but also badly misunderstood. On the one hand, people typically think that Religious Studies trains people for the clergy and that such courses reinforce a faith’s essential doctrines and teachings. Believers frequently see academic studies that challenge religious truths as illegitimate, misguided, and deliberately antagonistic. Indeed, they are often perceived as part of a secularist conspiracy against religion.
While maintaining that Religious and Biblical Studies cannot serve the interests of the Church and Synagogue, Dr. Linville argues these disciplines should not be regarded as an instrument of the so-called New Atheist Movement. Instead, Linville argues that Religious Studies has a rather different agenda and can often challenge the portrayal of religion and different religions in the popular atheist literature.
Through stories and personal reflection, Dr. Linville highlights what can be gained through taking a more sophisticated outsider’s perspective on religion and religions and suggests that secular courses in world religions be mandatory parts of school curricula in Alberta. Dr. Linville argues that, while our highly pluralistic society is founded on … Continue reading
Well, the internet has sorted it all out for me!
And I used to think it was all about carburetors!
Zeba Crook from Carleton University has a great article in Bible and Interpretation
What if one were to translate the Bible according to the same principles as we translate Homer, Aristotle, and Freud? What if we were to translate the Bible regardless of the faith of its potential readership, regardless of any investment in the question of whether the texts are right or wrong, and regardless of how the texts might be used to address contemporary faith? This paper does not seek to answer this question in full, but only to initiate a conversation on the matter.
It is a great read. Crook discusses a number of translation examples showing how translators have cooked the books to make the ancient text more palatable, or the NT consistent with the OT. Two of his five conclusions:
So, what principles for a secular translation of the Bible might we draw from these examples?
1) That a secular critical translation should follow as closely as possible the wording and language and the texts we have, even where that meaning is unclear. This means avoiding the addition of words aimed at gender inclusivity, and it means retaining words or language that might offend modern sensibilities.
2) It means retaining the foreignness of the text, its cultural otherness, its strangeness. A secular translation should not try to make a pre-modern pre-enlightenment ancient collectivistic Mediterranean rural text sounds like it is a modern post-enlightenment individualistic North American/Northern European urban text. The latter is only in … Continue reading
Meet Digger, my brother Ken’s new Lab. I actually haven’t met him in person yet, but hopefully I will before they need to move into a bigger house. The dog weighed 56 pounds at 6 months old.
Digger did not come pre-captioned so I had to add that. Ken sent a few more of him, too.
Courtesy of my brother:
He has a Baal at silly humor like this.
Anath’s all I have to say about that, I have an Aaron to run…
But when I do, he cries.
Here’s one I found
I made this one:
- http://diylol.com
I made this one, too.
And the Lord Human made Huey, Dewey, Louie, Wall-E, and Eve from the dust of excess. My SBL Abstract
I’ve been working on an SBL paper proposal and just submitted it. It’s probably full of typos. As usual. And silliness. As usual.
Its for the “Scripture and Film” section. Never submitted a paper on movies before, so I’m kind of excited. I really hope they take it. Here is the abstract:
And the Lord Human made Huey, Dewey, Louie, Wall-E, and Eve from the dust of excess. The deification of humanity in Silent Running and Wall-E.
The 1972 film, Silent Running (dir. Douglas Trumbell) and the 2008 hit animated feature, Wall-E (dir. Andrew Stanton), revolve around themes of a future Earth unable to support vegetation. Both films freely adapt Genesis’s stories of paradise and Noah’s ark, albeit to different ends. Neither film is a warning about the death of humanity because of environmental damage, but a call to “enlightenment”, i.e., to knowledge of a true relationship between nature and humanity. Yet, both films undermine this truth even as it is asserted as they seemingly put an ignorant humanity in the place of a deity as creators of robots that carry “true” human ideals.
Silent Running is set aboard one of a number of giant spacecraft housing the last remnants of Earth’s forests. The story revolves around a crew member, Freeman Lowell and the ship’s three robots (named Huey, Dewey, and Louie). Enraged by an order to destroy the forest-domes so that the ship can return to commercial use, Lowell murders his crew-mates. Before committing suicide, he leaves one forest-dome in the care … Continue reading
Biblioblogger Chris Tilling usually ends up in some pretty funny places, at least according to another (alleged) blogger who often reports on reports of Tilling’s reported appearances. I’ve no idea where the heck he is now, but here is how he “navigates”. He has guidance from the heavens: A Godly Path Satellite!
We all know where he is trying to get to, though. He is trying to come to God:
Saw this at Dhormockery.com I’m not sure, but I think the site is in Hindi. Can’t read any of the text, but this is surely part of the Global Evil Atheist Conspiracy (Blasphemous Iconography Command), and whoever is behind it does a great job finding good images. Translates a lot of cartoons into her/his own language too.
Also found this there. Take that, you irresponsible pet owning deities! It’s from the Poo-attitudes
And what a short but glorious trip it’s been! It all began about a month ago in my capacity as general dog’s body (for those of you who know Molly, pun intended) at Tommy Gun Molly’s Swanky Jazz Bar and Seminary.
So, crank on some tunes, to get you in the mood
And here is Molly, Owner and Proprietor
Here are some pictures of the bar taken just before the Semi-Grand Opening when there was still a bit of work to do. Photos by Mary.
The front bar with 3 beer taps. I wish I had a better light installed
in front of the bar, but we thought the available light would be enough
for reading and marking papers. Alas, it was not, hence the temporary desk lamp.
Kegs are stored under the tap tower, the small cabinet to the left of the
bar holds the beer gas tank.
Here’s the back bar with associated bottles.
So anyway, I tapped a keg of Samuel Adam’s Boston Lager at the great “Oh Crap, it’s started again, terms start party in January. It’s officially designated as a Great Beer, and is much to the liking of one of Molly’s regulars, Kevin McGeough, who teaches Hebrew and Archy of the Ancient Near East at the U of Lethbridge and Silliness 101 at Molly’s Seminary. It appears the good Dr. drank tons of the stuff in his Harvard Days.
Now, kegs are pretty anonymous. One gets the big metal can with perhaps a … Continue reading
It’s time for Dr. Jim to start thinking about what sort of papers to propose for November’s Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Chicago as the deadline is fast approaching. I’ve never been to Chicago, so this is going to be a treat. But what sort of paper to do? I wish I had a mind to make up.
Since I’m working on Hebrew Bible mythology, I suppose I should do a paper on that, but the Bible, Myth and Myth Theory session is really encouraging New Testament papers this time around, but they might have room for one on ancient Israel and the Old Testament as a mythic places and spaces for thought in modern religion, (relying on Burton Mack, J. Z. Smith, Wendy Doniger).
I’m on the steering committee of the Israelite Prophetic Literature Program Unit, but I don’t feel right proposing papers for sessions I’m helping to plan and for which I have to evaluate other folks’ abstracts. I’m also on the steering committee for the proposed Secular Biblical Criticism program unit which will probably go through a name change before gaining final approval. If we get a session this year (as we did last year) I do have a few papers in mind, but since we have had to have 4 or 5 sessions pencilled in (we had to come up with a multi-year plan for the application to prove we could sustain interest), it would depend what the other folks on the committee thought best to … Continue reading
Found this on Youtube while looking for some interesting Bar Mitzvah videos for my class. This young fellow is priceless!
And then there was Krusty’s
Anyway, here’s something else Jewish, its a lot less fun but really quite beautiful. In a way it is a small part of the Jewish story our young Bar Mitzvah should remember, regardless of what he believes about God. It’s Eli, Eli, (Walk to Caesarea) written by Hannah Szenes (executed in WWII), sung by Sophie Milman, my favourite Slinky Jazz Babe™
The Bird is apparently NOT the Word-ending.
Thanks to Helen Arrol and Facebook for the above. But not the below.
Or this.
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