A Promo for Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus For something like 1500 years of Western Civilization, and going back another roughly 1500 prior to that in Jewish history, the Exodus narrative of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt was more or less accepted as a historical event. But today, mainstream archaeology says it probably didn’t happen. Yes, some artifacts have … [Read more...]
The Stones Cry Out: A Review of The Interview
If Sony pictures wanted to stir up a buzz over a film, they could hardly have orchestrated a better series of events than the geo-political drama that played out ahead of The Interview: a mysterious cyberattack on Sony reportedly originating out of North Korea, followed by threats of violence against any theater that dared to show the film, followed by an abrupt Sony decision … [Read more...]
Principles in Revolution
A Review of The Principle Shortly before his death in 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) in which he proposed that the motion of the planets could be better explained by assuming that the sun, rather than the earth, sits at the center of the universe (the Solar System being the extent of … [Read more...]
The Song
The Song opens with Jed King at a crossroads. The musician son of a highly successful musician, the David King, Jed’s still playing small time gigs in local bars, and he’s ready to call it quits. Enter Rose, the lovely daughter of a Kentucky vineyard owner. Rose is recovering from a lost dream herself. Her boyfriend dumped her because she refused to sleep with him without … [Read more...]
Honor Living: How the Moral Absolutes Elevate Human Life
On the evening of January 1st, 2008, at approximately 7:30pm, a call came in to the Irving, TX, 911 emergency response line. A female voice came screaming onto the line, “Help me … my dad shot me and now I'm dying!” The caller was 17-year-old Sarah Said. She and her sister Amina, 18, had been shot multiple times in a taxi cab which had been abandoned at the service entrance of … [Read more...]
It’s Evidential
A review of Discovering Intelligent Design: A Journey into the Scientific Evidence by Gary Kemper, Hallie Kemper, and Casey Luskin When Hallie Kemper, a homeschool educator and science teacher, set out to locate a curriculum for intelligent design (ID), she couldn’t find one that met her needs. So she and her husband Gary, a former aerospace scientist and ID skeptic who had … [Read more...]
Blows and Blowback
Rosaria Champagne Butterfield was a contented, tenured English professor at Syracuse University specializing in Queer Theory and Gay and Lesbian Studies when she set out to write a book on the Religious Right. Why did they hate her and her gay and lesbian community? she wanted to know. An intelligent, thirty-six year old lesbian who considered herself a fine, moral human being, … [Read more...]
The Argument of the Shadows
In June, 2002, in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attack, 25-year-old Pat Tillman abruptly left a multi-million dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals and enlisted in the US Army. He declined all interview requests, asking to be looked upon as any other soldier. Nevertheless, the news turned him into a national phenom overnight. Two years later, he was shot and … [Read more...]
The Big History Project
[Somebody's] Truth about the Universe and How You Fit into It In the 1980s, David Christian, a 40-ish year-old professor of Russian history at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, became discontent teaching “just the history of one country.” “[N]ot really sure … in a sense, who I am,” he wanted to know about the history of humanity as a whole. “That question forced me … [Read more...]
Jesus of Testimony
Greg Spencer of Roseburg, OR, was a police officer in narcotics enforcement in the 1990s. His work kept him immersed in a world of violence, death, and depravity on a regular basis. In addition he was a deputy medical examiner, which meant he had to view autopsies, often on bodies whose life had ended in a horrible death. He was dedicated to his work, but it turned him into a … [Read more...]