Tried to make this case in an Op Ed last month while the TN General Assembly advanced a bill about displaying the Ten Commandments in schools. Unfortunately, they passed the bill into law, and altered the language to make these monumental displays mandatory. rhodes.box.com/s/wolk6qly8z...

I oppose this unconstitutional, immoral, and strategically self-defeating war we are fighting in West Asia, but not because the Bible tells me to.

Two things are missing here.

1) Divine warfare is not waged exclusively in the OT; read Revelation and see a divinely-led war that dwarfs anything we encounter in the OT.

2) That NT war is led by Christ, so I'm not sure how Christlike it is for the Pope to be anti-warfare.

What a great cover!

Finished hardwood chair pictured. The seat is slotted with a carved bowl for butt. The chair has rounded corners, sleek, mid century modern lines, and a natural wood finish leaving a slightly ambered look to the nicely figured light wood. The chair sits under direct lighting, so the slotted seat casts a slotted shadow on the grey polished concrete floor beneath it.

Here is the proof of concept chair I finished first. This one is ash with a natural tung oil finish.

In a crowded shed space are eight partially assembled chairs. They lack a back rest piece. Just two side assemblies joined to a solid seat with a carved out bowl section for the butt. Five species of wood are featured. Two light colored hard maple, two slightly darker cherry, one red oak, one even darker white oak, and two redder/darker African mahogany. A Festool domino sits in the foreground on the edge of a workbench. The end clamp on the workbench has a bench plane clamped in it with the blade facing up. In the background are yard tools and four bikes, including a green kids bike, two adult bikes hanging on the wall, one red and one purple, and one gold tandem.

Making progress on my dining room chair project. See alt text for wood species. Two ash chairs, one completed and one in progress not pictured.

A genealogy bridges the creation story and the flood. Genealogies are among the features that often discourage contemporary readers from reading the Bible straight through. Line after line of difficult names—each person living so many years before fathering another difficult name, then living hundreds more years, having additional children, and dying after an implausibly long lifespan—does not make for especially gripping reading. Yet tempting as it may be to skip over the priestly genealogy in the primeval history, it is worth persevering. When we do, we discover that it is more interesting than it first appears.

I really love this paragraph. Particularly the third sentence!

Yahweh is not following a master plan. At every step, he improvises and solves problems as they appear. One could hardly claim that his creation is good, because he himself recognizes it is not—explicitly in chapter two and implicitly every time he changes his mind.

At the beginning of the story, humanity’s evil inclination fills him with regret. By the end, however, he realizes humanity is worth preserving despite their evil bent—perhaps even because of it. (The smell of a good barbeque likely helps as well.)

Next time it will prompt you to put in pi, unrounded, and you'll feel the infinitely authentic!

Genesis treats Cain’s murder of Abel as self-evidently sinful. But why is it wrong for Cain to kill his brother? I ask the question not because fratricide is an ethical gray area but because so many people claim the divine commands in the Bible ground their moral beliefs. Yet Yahweh hasn’t prohibited murder. In fact, he offers no prescriptions or proscriptions about human behavior, other than generically encouraging Cain to do good. The story assumes that murder is wrong even though God has not issued any command against it. Whatever one makes of the divine commands that appear later in the Bible—though the epic tradition contains no moral commands or divine laws—the story about Cain makes clear that moral obligation exists first, before any divine decree.

This paragraph isn't necessary the most beautiful prose I've written, but it captures in nuce the argument of the book I want to write next!

This looks great! Looking forward to taking a deeper dive.

The story of Cain, the firstborn of Eve, recounts the murder of his brother Abel and explores the beginnings of human wrongdoing. While Cain remains responsible for his sin, Yahweh fans the flames of resentment.

his companion among the animals. Episodes like these reveal that Yahweh is working without a master plan. He has no Platonic blueprint after which to fashion the world. Creation, in this epic strand of Genesis, unfolds through trial and error—through experimentation, missteps, and gradual refinement. Yahweh isn’t perfect, either in foresight or in execution; he is learning.

Very proud of the subheading I came up with last night:

When Balaam's Ass Saved His Ass

. . . already drawn attention to the lack of rain, yet Yahweh does cause rain to fall. Instead, he causes a subterranean source of water to well up from the ground in a mist; rain will not fall on the earth until the flood in chapter seven. Subtle though it is, creating water this way—rather than the rain the narrator describes—suggests that Yahweh’s first act of creation falls short of the ideal set up in the story itself.

As in earlier epics and likewise in Plato, the epic voice in Genesis does not explore the origin of matter. The world, unformed and unfruitful, already exists at the beginning of the story. To create, in the epic imagination, is to make the barren earth bear fruit.

While the reasons are undoubtedly complex, one factor is the rather superficial grasp these authors had on the Bible and religion. Their arguments revealed a rather naive understanding—one unlikely to survive an introductory college course in the very subjects they sought to dismantle. ~New athiests

Carrie Underwood sitting at the judges desk for the show American Idol saying "Just bring it on! I love it! Your boos are feeding me!"

People who attend church or synagogue and confess that God is good might believe they are expressing a biblical idea, but they’re more likely to find support for their faith in the works of Plato than in the Bible.

I've been furiously writing the past month, and I realize I've built up quite a library of sentences I'm proud of. Some are really thoughtful, others just pretty. I may try posting one a day for a bit to preview what I'm working on. I'll begin with the hook from my proposal:

The title reminds me of Nathan MacDonald's CBQ article!

pique curiosity
stimulate imagination
discover new interests
learn how to participate in democracy
build community

I learn so much when I teach a course that I have developed. It's weird to say, but its true! Last semester crystalized so many things for me, and then I realized at the end of class some things weren't coming together as clearly. I learned I wasn't ready to write that part and returned to research.

Fuck ICE!

How's this for a hook?

Before it ever occurred to me as a child to ask the question, “Why does a good God allow bad things to happen to good people?” I learned the answer from a beaver bearing witness to a lion—at least, I learned an answer.

For my birthday yesterday, I gave myself the gift of finishing the chapter summaries for my book proposal. I first shopped the book out in 2020-21, but between COVID and a serious nerve problem, I had to put the project on hold. I've significantly revised the project and am stoaked to start writing!

No worries. It's a really funny skit by the comedian Gianmarco Soresi where he pokes fun at technical distinctions between attractions to different ages of children. It is very much in line with the sentiment of your original post.

Technically speaking . . .
youtu.be/nu6C2KL_S9o?...