Monthly Archives: May 2016

Equus, part 1

Posted on Sunday 29 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

From Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, written in 1973 and later adapted into a film directed by Sidney Lumet, starring Richard Burton and Peter Firth. Burton played a psychiatrist investigating a young man played by Firth, who had inexplicably attacked and … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Luck; Facebook and social bubbles; being openly secular

Posted on Thursday 26 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

One author with a new book currently making the circuit of talk shows and newspaper op-ed pages is Robert H. Frank, whose book is Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, and who turned up on KQED’s … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Innovation, Optimism, Conspiracy Theories, and Liberals

Posted on Thursday 26 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Four items from the New York Times, Sunday before last. Neil Irwin: What Was the Greatest Era for Innovation? A Brief Guided Tour. What strikes me about this is not so much which era was greatest, as how much things … Continue reading →

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Dan Barker on Meaning without Divine Dictates, and the Slave Mentality

Posted on Thursday 19 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Dan Barker’s Life Driven Purpose (Pitchstone, April 2015), is much more cheerful than Lindsay’s book just reviewed. It’s an explicit response to religious superstar Rick Warren, and his ‘purpose-driven life’, in which everything about your life is in service to … Continue reading →

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James A. Lindsay on the Obsolescence of Theism

Posted on Tuesday 17 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Two posts today, both about slender trade paperbacks of the genre that includes, earlier reviewed, John Loftus’s THE OUTSIDER TEST FOR FAITH (review) and titles by Greta Christina, Adam Lee, and Peter Boghossian (links to those reviews in that review): … Continue reading →

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Ehrman, JESUS BEFORE THE GOSPELS: Memories, Stories, and the Gospels

Posted on Wednesday 11 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

I’ve read eight or ten books in recent weeks that I haven’t yet blogged about here (including three SF novels), but I plan to catch up. First, mentioned earlier as remarkably coincidental considering my recent Bible reading, is a new … Continue reading →

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Links and Comments: Two from Today’s NYT

Posted on Sunday 8 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

First, fascinating essay by Michael P. Lynch (author of just-released The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data): Trump, Truth and the Power of Contradiction. How is it Trump can say completely contradictory … Continue reading →

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Reading In and Around the Bible: Epistles of Paul, 2

Posted on Sunday 8 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

First Corinthians: 1:7, “as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Another allusion to Paul’s prediction of the imminent Second Coming, which has conspicuously failed to happen for some 2000 years now. Again, why hasn’t this most … Continue reading →

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Reading In and Around the Bible: Epistles of Paul, 1

Posted on Sunday 8 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Working my way through the New Testament; after the four gospels, and Acts, much of it is the epistles of Paul, seemingly the creator of the Christian religion. (My current plan is to read through the rest of the NT … Continue reading →

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Religious Liberty and Christian Theology

Posted on Sunday 8 May 2016 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon: Republicans have turned God upside down with their so-called “religious liberty”. The “liberty” part in “religious liberty” is not intended to empower the believers of a dominant religion, such as, say, Christianity, to give them the “liberty” to impose … Continue reading →

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