ken wilson online

Some in my faith community can get a little testy when Charles Darwin’s name comes up.  So when Carl Safina, my friend the atheist and ocean conservationist, told me that Jesus and Darwin were his two heroes, I decided it was time to read Darwin’s Origin of Species for myself. After all, I’ve often challenged those who have any prickly opinions about Christianity to temper said opinions by reading the gospels.  Much can be learned by going to the source documents.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well I’ve gone and made a few of you nervous, which means we’ve got a good conversation going about Jesus and Paul and understanding this book that is so important to us or we wouldn’t bother.  In some of the comments to my previous post I detected a certain unease about the idea that there might be any difference in the relative weight or significance of various biblical writers or books in the Bible.  As if any suggestion of such a difference entailed a rejection of parts of the received text of Scripture.
Read the rest of this entry »

Something is happening.  After centuries wrestling with the “doctrine of biblical inspiration” believers have worked themselves into an exhausted lethargy about this book.  We’ve been so busy either debunking or defending it, that we’ve forgotten to simply enter it on it’s own terms to know what punch it packs.  But what I see happening is a growing body of people who have no dog in that old fight.  They don’t approach the Bible with any pre-conceived notions about its inspiration or lack thereof. They could care less about words like inerrancy or form criticism.  They may be completely uninformed about the Jesus seminar and reactions to it. They are outside the camp of insitutional religion, but not outside the reach of Jesus.  They are simply readers without rubrics, responding to the text as it is given to them and they are as disparate a group as Reynolds Price, the novelist, Leon Kass, the bio-ethicist at University of Chicago and Layzie Bone, the rapper.
Read the rest of this entry »