Monday, October 7, 2013

brick a brack 071013

Hi long suffering and much neglected blog fans, a little brick a brack to warm your cockles . . .

Candida Moss has been stirring up trouble, taking on O'Reilly (HT Robert Myle's nu blog) to argue that Jesus was an anachronistic socialist. (particularly entertaining is O'Reilly the writer of history books not knowing what anachronistic is! ;-))



but also writing revisionist rubbish about Christian martyrdom of which Clayton Croy writes a stinging review.

While conservative Christian rhetoric is sometimes guilty of excesses, this book swings
hard in the opposite direction, revising history and denying much of the evidence for
early Christian persecution. Modern ideology drives Moss’s thesis more than ancient
testimony, and the result is a distortion of history more severe than the caricature she
wants to expose.
Ouch!

I really enjoyed this article on the evolution of humans as "hot day meat chasers"
But what most sets us apart as runners is that we’re really cool—we naked apes are champion sweaters and can dissipate body heat faster than any other large mammal. Our main rivals for the endurance-running crown fall into two groups: migratory ungulates, such as horses and wildebeest, and social carnivores, such as dogs and hyenas. They can easily out-sprint us by galloping. But none can gallop very far without overheating
And look out for the the new atheist church, it is all the fun of church but without all that God bothering!



Enjoy!

Jesus treats the Syrophoenecian Woman as a Disciple

[This is an extract from my essay "Breaking Bread: The Power of Hospitality in the Gospel of Mark" which you can read in full and ...