Posts Tagged 'Bible'

The Society of Biblical Literature (of which I am a member) has just initiated a survey that will be used as part of the preparation for a new educational web site called “The World of the Bible: Exploring people, places, and passages“.  Please take a few minutes and fill out the anonymous survey, as your feedback and comments will be immensely helpful.  Thanks!

For those of you who have been following the development of the Certificate of Christian Studies at UNBC the last couple of years, you may be interested in knowing about the future.  No, not the whole “future”, just the future of Christian Studies.    The course offering will be expanding from six courses to seven, which will reflect a modification to the Church History course(s) and the Old/New Testament courses, and the addition of a new course called

Interesting question, isn’t it?  I was asked that question a few days ago, and I pointed the person to one verse and then made one observation (just a summary of our discussion!).  The practice of cremation is not specifically mentioned in the Bible.  However, a section in the Bible that talks about how a Christian’s “eternal” body will be different than his/her “physical” body is 1 Corinthians 15:42-44 (make sure you read it in context).  The eternal does not seem to be limited by the physical.  Also, the physical body starts to decay the moment the person dies, so whether the process takes a few minutes (eg, cremation) or a few years (eg, burial), the end result would seem to be the same, wouldn’t it?

What do think about cremation?

Have you ever wanted to look at a 1,600 year old manuscript of the Bible?  If so, you can now go to Codex Sinaiticus and view digital images of the actual pages of the ancient codex.  It is pretty impressive, especially since the actual pages themselves are stored in various locations around the world and are not easily accessible.

The hand-written Greek text contains both the Septuagint and the New Testament, and you can zoom in/out, and view both transcriptions and translations of the codex.  Check it out!

Mixed in with all of the useless stuff on the Internet, there are occasionally some great resources.  And Covenant Theological Seminary’s Worldwide Classroom is definitely one of the good ones!  They provide FREE lecture manuscripts, study guides and mp3’s for twenty courses in spirituality, Biblical studies, theology, ministry, etc.  If you are looking to deepen and expand your Christian worldview, why don’t you take some time and explore the Worldwide Classroom.

Well, believe it or not, I am now on iTunes U!  Crazy.  As part of our ongoing e-learning initiatives at AMU, I have been creating and incorporating video summaries into some of my online classes.  Within the classes, the target group has been current students.  As a next step, the university is expanding its reach outside of its digital “walls”, and has now started to provide a selection of course videos as free podcasts through iTunes U.

So … if you are interested in watching some of my weekly Introduction to the Bible video summaries, you can subscribe to this video podcast.  Let me know what you think!

As a result of last Sunday’s teaching time, I have had a few people ask me about the section of Ephesians that I re-wrote by exchanging/inserting the term “future spouse”.  It was a pretty effective way of making the Biblical text immediately applicable to a pre-marriage (and marriage) relationship.  So, here it is again:

Be completely humble and gentle with your future spouse; be patient, bearing with him/her in love.

Each of you must put off falsehood and speak truthfully to and about your future spouse.

In your anger do not sin against your future spouse: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry with your future spouse, and do not give the devil a foothold.

Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth toward your future spouse, but only what is helpful for building him/her up according to his/her needs.

Have you been looking for a good, free, web-based resource that combines the text of the Bible with current satellite imagery?  If so, check out BibleMap.org – it shows geographical places names from the ESV/KJV on Google Maps.  Simple idea, great implementation.  Check it out!

I am doing some research about how and when God spoke to people in the Old Testament.  It has been facinating on number of levels, but one thing that has really intrigued me is the frequency and location of either “God said …” or “the Lord said …” throughout the text (based on Hebrew, not English – you can contact me if you want to know the details).  Anyway … have a look at this graph (click to enlarge it):

Here are a few of my observations:

Well, after a lot of testing, crashing, uploading, fixing, more testing and more uploading (yeesh!), I now have a full set of course videos created for RELS311 Introduction to the Bible!  Some of them are classroom specific, but most are publicly available (and will also be available as podcasts on iTunes U).  If you are curious, I have posted the course introduction video below:

In addition, I have created a “Course Videos” page that will be periodically updated with new videos, etc.

Let me know what you think, and feel free to give me ideas for new course resources!