Month: May 2013 (Page 1 of 4)

Things like this often become caricatures of themselves, or at least, of the very thing they strive to criticize:

“I have no doubt that Taussig and his collaborators had the purest and most honest of intentions. But they convened a self-selected, self-authorized “council” of spiritual savants for the purpose of revising a canon along explicitly ideological lines. Shouldn’t it have occurred to someone that this amounts to a sort of parody of the conspiracy-theory version of early church history?”

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Read it all: A new canon, created by 19 people | The Christian Century

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This blows my mind. evidently there is a small and ever shrinking tribe of readers in the US.

After winning the highest honor in the literary world, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize winners have seen sales increases – but so far the numbers are pretty tiny.

Read it all: Pulitzer Prize: huge sales neither required nor guaranteed

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“FRANKFURT- In a rare display of professional consensus, an international consortium of anthropologists, archaeologists, and molecular biologists have formally released an exasperated sigh over the popularity of the so-called “Paleo Diet” during a two-day conference dedicated to the topic.”

FRANKFURT- In a rare display of professional consensus, an international consortium of anthropologists, archaeologists, and molecular biologists have formally released an exasperated sigh over the popularity of the so-called Paleo Diet during a two-day conference dedicated to the topic.

Read it all: Archaeologists Officially Declare Collective Sigh Over “Paleo Diet” | hells ditch

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I love both the novel and the show, but I’ve never thought of it this way:

Arrested Development Is The Brothers Karamazov » Helen Rittelmeyer | A First Things Blog

“‘An epileptic chicken,’ is how the accused described Smerdyakov.” Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, unless the family consists of a morally depraved patriarch and three highly differ…

Read it all: \u003Ci>Arrested Development\u003C/i> Is \u003Ci>The Brothers Karamazov\u003C/i>

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My wife Anna has been working hard to get the edits finished for her second book, The Guardians. Check out her take on writing, and some of the ideas she has for future stories.

Read it all: A.E. Howard: On Writing and First Tries

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“Perhaps a bit of bluegrass gospel is just what the doctor ordered, an earthy and melodic salve to cure an eschatological blindness.”

Today marks the first anniversary of the death of the blind flat-picking guitar master and folk legend Arthel “Doc” Watson.

Read it all: Can Bluegrass Save Your Mortal Soul?

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I love things like this. Great news:

“An Italian professor said on Wednesday he has identified what he believes is the world’s oldest complete scroll of the Torah, containing the full text of the first five books of Hebrew scripture.Mauro Perani, professor of Hebrew at the University of Bologna, said experts and carbon dating tests done in Italy and the United States dated the scroll as having been made between 1155 and 1225.

The scroll, which has been in possession of the Bologna University Library for more than 100 years, had been previously thought to be from the 17th century. It had been labeled “scroll 2”.

There are many fragments of the Torah that are older but not complete scrolls with all five books.”

An Italian professor said on Wednesday he has identified what he believes is the world’s oldest complete scroll of the Torah, containing the full text of the first five books of Hebrew scripture.

Read it all: World’s Oldest Complete Torah Found in Italian University Library

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Iconoclasts and zealots stay true to form and attempt to destroy whatever doesn’t fit into their narrow narrative of history. Thankfully in this situation they were largely thwarted.

“The New York-based Ford Foundation, the German and Dutch governments, and an Islamic center in Dubai provided most of the funds for the operation, which cost about $1 million.“We took a big risk to save our heritage,” said Abdel Kader Haidara, a prominent preservationist who once loaned 16th- and 18th-century manuscripts from his family’s private collection to the Library of Congress. “This is not only the city’s heritage, it is the heritage of all humanity.””

An unlikely cast of characters rescued the ancient city’s treasured manuscripts from jihadists.

Read it all: How Timbuktu’s manuscripts were saved from jihadists

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The idea is to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean.

Read it all: Computers Piecing Together Jigsaw of Jewish Lore

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“There is too often a shameful culture of silence around rape and abuse in the church. But equally pressing is the confusion or silence in many evangelical communities around the pattern-forming behaviors that lead to it. For men and women alike, this brand of silence has roots in a sexualized view of women, and is given context in a power narrative that is built to protect and perpetuate male dominance in the church.”

Most of us are too familiar with this story: an Upper Midwestern Baptist minister claims that “God made Christianity to have a masculine feel [and] ordained for the church a masculine ministry.” Or a Reformed Christian pastor mocks the appointment of the first female head of the Episcopal Church, co…

Read it all: In the Image of God: Sex, Power, and ‘Masculine Christianity’

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