composite triple beat“Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum”online casino is currently on display. As the title suggests, these are all artifacts that are housed in the British Museum. They are on loan to the Boston Museum of Fine arts from September 2008 to January 2009.

I have not seen the exhibit yet, but a colleague of mine at Merrimack College said it was very well done. She is not a biblical scholar, but by her description of one of the reliefs, I believe the scene depicting Sennacherib’s siege of Lachish is one of the pieces on display. I have not been able to find an official list of the artifacts in the exhibit, so I cannot confirm this.

If you want to attend, please keep in mind that tickets are required. You can purchase tickets for specific times of entry on the MFA web site, and the ticket is only good for that time slot. The exhibit tickets are $25 (plus “convenience fee”), and that is on top of the general admission of $17 (plus “convenience fee”).

You can visit the exhibit’s web siteмебели пловдив for more details.

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Wiley served at North Johnson City Baptist Church in Tennessee. This is the church of my earliest memories. My family attended this church until I was about thirteen years old. My mother was the director of day care and my now step-father was the minister of music. We left around the same time that Wiley moved to another church.

Wiley was a deeply committed Christian and an outstanding pastor. His pastoral skills were remarkable. He had a way of touching and inspiring everyone around him. The thing I remember most was his storytelling ability. He was a master at it, as is evidenced by his participation in the National Storytelling Festival. As a child, I loved his children’s sermons. He could make you feel like you were there, eating fish beside the Sea of Galilee with Jesus or handing a stone to David as Golath rushed upon him. I accepted Christ at a revival that Wiley preached, and he was the one who baptized me.

Just recently, I learned of a story that illustrates well the way that Wiley touched all those around him. In 1976, Wiley was travelling from Nashville back to Johnson City. He stopped at a restaurant on the way through Knoxville to grab some dinner. His waitress, a woman named Lynn Morgan, was an eighteen-year-old from Ohio who was struggling to get by. Wiley talked and joked with her while she waited on him. When he left, she found a poem that he had left for her. At the bottom, he had written, “Lynn, You are a pretty, pleasant, and efficient young lady. Have love, have joy, have peace. Wiley I. Rutledge 7/16/76.” The handwritten poem, entitled rent a car bulgaria“Through All These Years,” is available online.

Lynn kept the poem and treasured it. She would pull it out and read it from time to time. After the birth of her first child, the placed the poem in a baby book so that her daughter would someday read it. She didn’t know Wiley or where he was from, and she assumed she would never see him again. This past summer, however, she found a reference to his name in a column written by Wiley’s son, Mark Rutledge, who writes for The Daily Reflector in Greenville, NC. She contacted Mark, who arranged for Lynn to meet with Wiley on his farm in Gray, TN.

Wiley had Alzheimer’s during the last years of his life, so he didn’t remember Lynn. But it was a blessing to his family to hear this story for the first time. As his son writes:

For him, the ones he touched are lost in the fog of a disease that will eventually take his life.

For us closest to Wiley I. Rutledge, having one of those people step out of the fog and bring to light such meaningful moments with him is nothing short of a gift from God.

My sister, Sue Ellen, says the gift is God’s way of reassuring us that he remembers our father even if our father doesn’t remember him.

You can read the complete story, which Mark wrote for The Daily Reflector. It was published just two months before Wiley passed away. I don’t know about you, but the story has encouraged me to pay more attention to those around me every day.

To me and those who knew him, Wiley will always be a giant of the Christian faith. He was an incredible preacher, but the best sermon of all was the constant love of Christ he showed to those around him. As my step-father said in a letter he wrote to let us know of Wiley’s death, Wiley was “a tremendous preacher and storyteller, a song writer, a poet, a great father and husband, a beloved grandfather, and a champion for the cause of Christ in and outside the walls of the church. His legacy of quietly reaching the people of the ‘down and out’ of the community will never be equaled by any other in my opinion. . . . [O]ur loss, and certainly heaven’s gain. As my former pastor, I’ll miss him!”

Wiley’s obituary is available in the Johnson City Press Chronicle.

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I found out about it earlier this week when my step-father got to write a verse during one of the stops in Johnson City, TN. The tour will be near me in Manchester, NH, on October 20, and then in Boston, MA, on October 22. Both of those are days I teach at the college, so I am not sure I will be able to make it to a signing.

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For those of you who are unfamiliar with the series, it is published by Moorehouse Publishing in conjunction with the Anglican Association of Biblical Scholars. It is intended for use by groups in church or for personal Bible study. So far the series comprises volumes on the Gospel of John, the parables, Hebrews, and the book of Revelation. My own contribution was on the law in the Old Testament.

Congratulations to Steve on his latest publication!

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The premier is this Saturday, September 13, at 9:00 p.m. eastern time. I have my DVR set to record it, and I will try to get a review of it up sometime next week (unless it is so bad that I simply can’t force myself to watch all of it).

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I am excited about doing the play and even more excited that my son will be doing it as well. Oliver! holds a special place in my heart. The movie version came out the year I was born and won five Oscars, including best picture. Oliver! was also the first play I ever did. At age twelve, I played a workhouse boy and pickpocket, just as my son will. My parents and brother were both in the play as well; my father played the police officer who shoots and kills Bill Sikes, the character I am now playing. The story is a compelling one, the characters are rich, and the songs are some of the best from any musical.

I did a lot of theater from grade school all the way through college. I have been in productions of The Sound of Music (3 times), South Pacific (twice), The Music Man, Carousel, Guys and Dolls, The Wiz, Camelot, Shadow Box, and several others. I consider the time I spent on stage some of the best training I ever had for teaching and preaching. I am thrilled that my son is going to get the same experience of being on stage.

The one downside is that the performances are the same weekend as the SBL meeting this November. I will have to miss Saturday and Sunday at the SBL, although I can make it to Sunday night receptions because our performance that day is a matinee. On the other hand, if anyone at the SBL wants to come north of Boston to see a performance, it is just a short train ride up. You can hear me sing and see me get shot, all for the price of admission. Conveniently, the performances are done at the Rogers Center for Performing Arts, which is on the campus of Merrimack College where I teach.

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It turns out that Logos allows users to employ mouse gestures to navigate through documents. For instance, if you hold the right mouse button and make a horizontal movement to the left, you return to the last passage you were reading. Making an upward gesture with the mouse will scroll the page up, while a downward gesture will scroll down. The program does not recognize many gestures, but it knows enough to make navigating much easier. If you want to see the complete list of movements it knows, do a search for “gestures” in the Logos help system.

I discovered this feature quite by accident. I have a plugin on Firefox that allows me to navigate the Internet with gestures. I inadvertently made one of the gestures in Logos without thinking and was surprised to find out that it worked there too.

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One look at the trailer would suggest that this is an Indiana Jones rip-off. But if you ignore the fact that Jack Hunter dresses exactly like Indiana Jones, overlook the parallel plots of an archaeologist going after an ancient artifact of enormous power that his rival who works for an enemy government would also like to find, pay no attention to the scimitar wielding Arabs that chase him through a bazaar, and set aside the attractive and headstrong female counterpart who starts off disliking him but ultimately comes to love him, you will see that the movies are totally different.

From a scholarly standpoint, the problems with this film appear to be legion. On the website, it talks about Ugarit, “a town in Syria that existed during the Pharoah’s [sic] reign . . . before they were wiped out by the Pharoahs.” Of course, the city of Ugarit was wiped out by the Sea Peoples, not by the Egyptians. Their web page goes on the say that Jack Hunter is one of the few archaeologists in the world who can interpret Ugaritic. At first I thought this was a mistake, since obviously many of us can read Ugaritic, but I later realized that this might be a slur aimed at archaeologists (i.e., lots of philologists can read Ugaritic, but only a few archaeologists can).

Of course, none of this will necessarily prevent the movie from being a good one. You don’t have to get history right to tell a good story. The trailer looks at least somewhat promising, so I will probably make an effort to see this when it comes out.

1. A couple of online sources are calling it Jack Hunter and the Lost Treasure of Ugarit. It is unclear which is the actual title. [back]

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The whole idea of looking for the antichrist is based on the flawed notion that the book of Revelation can be read as a roadmap to future events. This misreading has lead to an interpretive tradition that has built up a rather imaginative framework in which Revelation can be read. The Left Behind series, for instance, draws upon this concept to construct a fictional idea of what will happen at the end of time as a way to instruct readers about things that supposedly will happen at the end of time. This framework has led to many believers thinking they know more about the antichrist than St. John ever did.

The current brouhaha actually seems to have two levels. On one level there is the ads being put out by the McCain camp itself, such as the one below.¹ This ad and the discussions by opinion mongers such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are not intended as a serious statement that Obama is an antichrist. Instead, they is meant to poke fun at his popularity, his inspiring speeches, and the religious imagery he and his supporters sometimes use. It is Politics 101: take something positive about your opponent and make it seem like a negative.

Apparently it is acceptable for Republicans to use religious language about their candidate but not Democrats. I listened to talk show hosts on Christian radio in Washington, DC, say over and over that God choose Bush instead of Gore so that Bush would be commander-in-chief on September 11, 2001, usually with a quote from Esther 4:14 that Bush had come to power for “such a time as this.” But for some reason the same language used about a Democratic candidate raises red flags.²

Yet even though this topic is intended on the surface to poke fun at Obama, I am sure those who are originating the discussion are also aware that it will provoke unease about Obama in some circles (primarily evangelical circles).  While John Hagee and Jerry Jenkins have both rejected the idea that Obama is the antichrist, others have accepted it. Take, for example, the Barack Obama the Antichrist? blog, which seriously discusses the question of whether Obama is the antichrist.³ Steve Waldman of beliefnet.com has a good article in the Wall Street Journal that takes a look at this blog and some others, as well as discussing the McCain ad.

It is rather depressing that dispensationalism still holds sway over enough of the population that this kind of interpretation could be accepted by even a small percentage of the population. Here is a small sampling of the faulty arguments from Barack Obama the Antichrist?:

• “Obama has really been using biblical rhetoric, and people are seeing him as ‘the one’ to save us.” Of course, the Bible never says that the antichrist will be give the title “The One.” And if the use of biblical rhetoric makes one the antichrist, then I know a number of preachers that may qualify.
• Barack referred to himsef as the devil. Even setting aside the fact that the devil and the antichrist are two different figures, what Obama said was, “It’s the devil you know verses the devil you don’t.” Numerous politicians have quoted this well-known proverb, but that doesn’t make them the antichrist.
• When confronted with the idea that Revelation was referring to someone in the first century, he states that this may be the case, but “[e]ither way, Barack Obama stands against many of my beliefs.” But just because someone stands against many of your beliefs does not make them the antichrist; it makes them the antiyou. Obama also shares one belief in common with the guy, however, namely his belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Apparently such a belief is not enough to prevent him from being the antichrist.
• He quotes Matthew 24:4-8, which says that there will be famines and earthquakes at the end of time. He follows this by saying, “I am just saying this weather phenomenon is really lining up with the phenomenon that is Barack Obama.” Of course, Matthew 24:4-8 does not mention weather; it meantions famines and earthquakes. And if we are going to connect national leaders to bad weather, I think Bush and Katrina hold the number one slot.
• Finally, the guy who writes the blog refers to the last book of the Bible as “Revelations,” when the actual title is “Revelation.” Yes, it is a minor point, but it is a pet peeve of mine.

I could multiply these examples ad naseum, but you get the point. I couldn’t find a place where he makes an extended argument for Obama being the antichrist. Most of the blog is just posts that take a recent news story about Obama and argue that this is the kind of thing the antichrist would do.

I will be the first to admit that Obama supporters have sometimes gone overboard in their praise of Barack, just as most political supports do. Take, for example, the blog entitled Is Barack Obama the Messiah? But if such overstatements and exaggeration were always taken at face value, the hagiography about Reagan would have me believing that he was the Second Coming of Christ.

1. The ad says at the end that it was paid for by John McCain 2008, but it does not contain the standard “I’m John McCain and I approve this ad.” I don’t know if the candidate himself endorses this approach. [back]
2. Yes, I am aware that double standards in politics are common practice. For instance, the same Republicans who are arguing that Obama does not have enough experience are the same ones that said eight years ago that Bush had plenty of experience, even though Bush had held public office only eight years while Obama has been in public office eleven years. [back]
3. If you doubt whether the Left Behind series could inspire something like this, the blog has a link to the series in his sidebar. It is in a group entitled “Christian Links.” The only other links there connect to an online Bible and a site that discusses end-times prophecy. [back]

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I am teaching two section of “Introduction to Religious and Theological Studies,” which all students are required to take. All of the intro classes I have taught up to this point have been either introductions to the whole Bible or introductions to the OT or NT. I have never done a general religious studies or theological class, and this intro combines both into one semester.

I am using three books for the course. For the religious studies section, I am having them read The Sacred Quest: An Introduction to the Study of Religion by Lawrence Cunningham and John Kelsay. It was recommended by some other professors in the department, and I am enjoying the reading I have done in it so far. For the theological segment of the course I am using Theological Foundations: Concepts and Methods for Understanding Christian Faith by J.J. Meuller et al. It is a team-written book that explores doing theology within a Roman Catholic framework. Each chapter has a segment on doing theological research using library resources, which will be helpful to first year college students. For the final week, the students will read Henry Chadwick’s Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. This college is run by the Augustinian order, so it is appropriate to have the students learn a bit about St. Augustine.

Because of my particular interests, the biblical studies section of my class will cover a few more class meetings than is usual, but I don’t think St. Augustine would mind. Tolle lege!

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