Posts Tagged ‘ Bible ’

The Ten Commandments was one of the first Biblical epics to command a mass audience, and so my parents took me into downtown Detroit as a boy to be sure I saw it in its full widescreen glory in one of the few theaters capable of so screening it. The movie was well worth the [...]

With Easter coming up on Sunday, I thought it would be interesting to review the entry from the Bible Dictionary. Easter This word occurs only once in the Bible (Acts 12:4) and then would be better translated “Passover.” The word Easter is from Eastre, a Norse goddess whose pagan festival was observed at the spring equinox. [...]

Exodus 40:12-13 says 12  And thou shalt bring Aaron and his sons unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation and wash them with water. 13  And thou shalt put upon Aaron the holy garments, and anoint him and sanctify him;

For me, as a conservative Mormon guy living in Washington state, the 2012 elections were rough in a number of ways, starting from the top down: Romney lost the election.  I had spent a year volunteering for his campaign and truly thought he had a good chance of winning.  He nearly pulled it off, but [...]

A couple of months ago, while gathering up all of the data required to “render unto the IRS” and trying to feel better about all of the work involved in doing so, I ran across an interesting piece of Biblical literary criticism. It became even more interesting to me when I started thinking about the [...]

At the end of April, Community of Christ released to the church at large a “Draft Statement on Sexual Ethics” for public review and invited comments to be made by e-mail to the First Presidency. This Statement will be considered by the International Leaders Council (which has no strict equivalent in the LDS) in May [...]

Science knows that the Norse (Vikings) colonized Greenland a millennium ago, but the colony didn’t stick when colder temperatures returned following the Medieval Warm Period. Average daily temperatures in Greenland warmed about 3 degrees F before the plunge back into a Little Ice Age (which itself only ended well into the 19th Century) that forced [...]

 Job has some wonderful lessons.  For example, Job’s sufferings are not complete when he loses all of his possessions.  They don’t reach a fullness when his children die.  No, as he sits in the ruins of his house, covered in ashes and using a potsherd to scrape the boils from his body, his suffering reaches [...]

Like many people who consider the Book of Mormon as scripture, I am fascinated by questions about where it has a setting in ancient historical events. I know, of course, that many other people hold it as Scripture, but are content to see it as having no origin prior to a set of 19th Century visionary [...]

In my post last week on what we should do if we truly wanted to spread the gospel more effectively, there was some discussion in the comments on being spiritual vs being religious.  Is one possible without the other?  Is one “better” than the other?  Is there a difference between the two?  And, if so, [...]

Because I have had my own trials of faith, and have stood in the figurative shoes of those who see things from a non-believing standpoint, I have become increasingly aware of the language we use and the ways in which it contributes to our cultural peculiarities and often times sets people up for failure. Sometimes [...]

My son’s recent experience in early morning seminary caused me to look a little more closely at the church’s stance (or perhaps lack thereof) on evolution.  While teaching about the book of Genesis, his teacher made a few claims: that she is not descended from monkeys that the earth is literally 6,000 years old that evolution contradicts the [...]

Back in 2008, Jeff Spector introduced me to the concept of proof-texting.  I think we’re all familiar with the idea of taking a scripture out of context to support a certain religious belief.  However, I didn’t realize that this practice goes back thousands of years.  Charles Harrell and Greg Kofford Books has recently published a [...]

The word “apocrypha” means literally “things hidden away.”  In modern usage, an apocryphal book is any book not part of the Bible.  In that sense, the Book of Mormon could be called an apocryphal book; there is a new book called American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon.  It is a collection of essays by [...]

There has been a book of personal testimony making waves in Evangelical Christian circles for the past few months. Indeed, it isn’t just limited to Protestant Evangelicals; the person who recommended it to our family is a devout Catholic liberal. The book, entitled Heaven is for Real, is the real life story of Todd Burpo, [...]

“Bring a miracle and request a table. Those you heal must accept you into their homes….The deliberate conjunction of magic and meal,  miracle and table, free compassion and open commensality,  was a challenge launched not just at Judaism’s strictest purity regulations,…but at civilization’s eternal inclination to draw lines, invoke boundaries, establish hierarchies, and maintain discriminations…. [...]

There are some nutritious and delicious meals that you would never eat if you knew what was in them before you sat down at the table. I would never have had scrambled eggs, for example, if they’d first been described to me as ground-up unfertilized bird embryos. I had heard bad things about the Jesus [...]

The Scriptures picture the final battle of good and evil happening in a real place because many real battles have happened on that spot. The place is Megiddo,  a city — ancient even in Biblical times — that controls a pass through the Judean Hills (Carmel Range) to connect the coastal plain to the Jezreel [...]

With Passover beginning on April 19, I thought it might be nice to look at a new theory of the Exodus.  Bible Battles is a film by The History Channel that analyzes military strategy for many battles in the Bible.  They make the surprising claim that the Israelites in Egypt were not slaves, but were a [...]

First, I must start with a confession.  I haven’t yet watched General Conference.  Despite living in the future here in Asia, we are living in the past in terms of General Conference which will be aired at the local church next weekend (or alternatively, live on-line now).  However, I have read some of the recaps, [...]