Academia

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News flash: Resurrection story has staying power

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Holy Week is so nice that we have it twice here at GetReligion. The Western Church, which includes Daniel and me, had Holy Week last week. The Eastern Church and Terry are in the midst of Holy Week now. Oh that wacky Julian Calendar! Because of our many services, I was a bit out of the loop on what religious stories ran over the weekend. But I couldn’t miss one story as I received almost a dozen emails about it. The headline sort of says it all:


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The prayer of the publican

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I turned over a new leaf last year: I filed my taxes a month before they were due. This year, unfortunately, I’m back to my old tricks. I’ll be with the throng of last-minute filers causing a pedestrian and auto traffic jam at the Capitol Hill post office late tonight.


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Separation of mandala and state?

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The Buddhist monk who blessed Baltimore City Hall with a worship aide traveled to Detroit to do some outreach on a community college campus. Terry wrote earlier in the week about the interesting church-state issues raised by a Buddhist doing religious work on public property.


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Work that Rolodex

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Well, the Judas Gospel story, the one that was supposed to shake the foundations of Christianity, seems to have passed away rather quickly. Christianity was similarly unfazed by the week’s reports that Jesus walked on an ice floe (not water), that he wasn’t crucified in the manner in which people think, and that Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier named Pantera, not Joseph. Let’s see if Christianity implodes under the allegation that Jesus didn’t die on the cross so much as pass out after being doped up.


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What did the university print and ...

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Here’s a quick note to the reporters covering the case of Jason Johnson, the student who has been expelled at the University of the Cumberlands after outing himself in his MySpace.com profile. I should, just to be clear, note that Cumberland is a Baptist university, but not part of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the global network in which I teach.


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The gospel of ignorance

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My newsroom was all abuzz this week with the revelation of the Gospel of Judas. The media have been going nonstop with the news that a Gnostic tract has been translated that says Judas was helping Jesus rather than betraying him.


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Science explains everything

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I remember hearing a joke about a Sunday school teacher who was telling her young students about the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. This teacher was more learned than the average Sunday school teacher so she explained that the Moses hadn’t miraculously parted the water to enable the crossing. Rather, the sea was actually very shallow — only a couple of inches or feet deep, in fact. So while God did rescue his people, he didn’t use supernatural means.


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Maybe God only answers the prayers of Methodists

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A $2.4 million study on the effect of intercessory prayer came out last week and received a bunch of coverage. Researchers studying 1,800 heart-bypass patients at three hospitals found that intercessory prayer by strangers has no effect on the health of the person being prayed for. They also found that people fared worse — in the short-term at least — if they knew they were being prayed for.


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Tmatt, in Texas, with iffy WiFi (and a GOP jab)

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In a few hours, I am headed out the door on a long trip into my home state of Texas (I am a prodigal Texan) to visit several campuses in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (see a new trend story here) on behalf of the journalism program that I lead here in Washington, D.C.


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