A hilarious book: The DaVinci Cod

Yes, I spelled the title correctly - The DaVinci Cod. Written by Don Brine (a.k.a. Adam Roberts, professor of Nineteenth-Century Lit at London University), this book is absolutely hilarious. It's a parody of the ridiculously popular Da Vinci Code, but it's so much better. I received it this afternoon, went over to the library and read it and laughed the entire time (much to the chagrin of people trying to study nearby). If you haven't read any fiction lately and need a short book to read through, I highly suggest it.

(HT: Tim Brookins of Scripta De Divinis)

A New Forum for Textual Criticism

Find it here.

(HT: Stephen Carlson)

Who says Latin is a dead language?

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, gave a speech in Latin!! He was apparently a Classics Major at Oxford. Read about it here.

This reminds me of a story I heard about a Jesuit priest who ran into Fr. Henri de Lubac in the Vatican's library. They both wanted to speak with one another, but the priest didn't know French and de Lubac didn't know English - and suddenly they both had an "Aha" moment - Latin! They sat there and had a conversation in Latin in the Vatican library.

I wish I had started off with a Classics major instead of doing religion, to be honest. I think it's a lot more versatile and the emphasis on languages is very attractive. C'est la vie, I suppose.

Patristic Resources

Ben over at Dunelm Road gives us some links to Patristic Resources online.

On Respecting Religion

There's a very interesting series of blog posts all related to a man named Webster Cook stealing the Eucharist from a Catholic Church.

Chris Brady has a short post here.
PZ Myers (a Biologist who is a heavy-hitter in his field) wrote a rather long post here.
Drew Tatusko responds to PZ Myers here.


I think Drew makes an excellent point in his post: the patent disrespect of Myers (and many of his commenters) undermine the very "liberalism" that they themselves claim to espouse.

A personalized message to you, from God

I learned about the Personal Promise Bible through Scotteriology. I think this is a fine example of how our Enlightenment-fueled hyper-individualistic philosophy ruins theology. This is the logical conclusion of the "me and Jesus" ideology that pervades modern Christianity. Nevermind the communal nature of these texts. Take a text written for communities of people, take out the 2nd person plural pronouns and insert your name. St. Paul really was writing to you - it's in the Bible, after all.

Marcus Borg to speak at my school in November

Marcus Borg will be speaking at my (new) school, East Carolina University, on Tuesday, November 18th at 7pm. Students can attend for free, the general public can attend for only 10 dollars. I recently got a chance to hear William G. Dever last spring and there was hardly anyone here - so this may be a good chance to get to see Borg in smaller setting. Here's the website from the school.

A Greek Question

I was reviewing some Greek tonight and I've come across something I can't figure out : how do you write the imperfect of αμαρτανω? The issue is that the verb has both a first aorist and second aorist and the second aorist seems as if it would be the exact same as the imperfect (the 2nd aorist being ημαρτον).

Well howdy (subtitled: How to write a book review?)

I hope all is well out there for everyone who reads this on occcasion (to those of you who don't, I hope all is terrible). Another birthday has passed this week (I turned 24 on July 1...I'm getting old) and that means new cool books. Two of my favorites are Warren H. Carroll's first volume in his History of Christendom series (this one is titled The Founding of Christendom). The other book I got was Ben Witherington III, What have they done with Jesus. I just finished a few books - one being Mike Aquilina's The Mass of the Early Christians, and another on which he was an editor titled The Great Life: Essays on Doctrine and Holiness in honor of Father Ronald Lawler, O.F.M. Cap. As well as reading Orchard and Riley's The Order of the Synoptics: Why Three Synoptics?

I'm mentioning these books because I want to be able to move into doing actual book reviews on the blog, but....I don't know how. Obviously I know how to write a book report from school, but when I sit down to write a book review for the blog I feel like I'm working without a framework and I don't like that. So, this is a post to see if anyone will divulge their book-reviewing secrets. Where do you start? What do you do while reading? How do you divide it up?