via the OUP blog
“Happy World Penguin Day!” by Christopher Michel. CC viaFlickr
Penguins are some of the most varied and remarkable creatures on the planet. With 17 extant species’ inhabiting the earth, this bird family contain a vast range of sizes, habitats, skills, and behaviours. This April, to honour our animal of the month, we celebrate 10 amazing facts about the penguin.Continue reading (and see some stunning images)
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via the Big Think blog by Kenneth Primrose
By walking down the street of any major city, you are likely to see more diversity than an 18th-century explorer did in a lifetime. People with very different ideas of how society should function must live together, and there is no idea more divisive than that of religion. Many of the most important moral disagreements break out along religious lines. Indeed, differing religious views on freedom, sexuality and justice threaten social cohesion. That must not be allowed to happen.
One crucial way that people can best learn to live with one another is by increasing their religious literacy. In 1945, the British author C S Lewis said that one will gain greater insight into other belief systems by stepping inside and looking ‘along’ them, rather than looking ‘at’ them from the outside. He explained this by analogy. Think of the difference in the experience of looking at a beam of light through a window, in comparison with the experience of looking along it. It is from within that we can test a system’s internal consistency and its ability to form and inform the believer. The idea is to see religion not merely as a set of propositions held in the head, but, in the words of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, as a ‘lived experience’.
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a post by Ann Conway-Jones for the OUP blog
Christianity by Tama66. Creative Commons via Pixabay
A recent phenomenon in New Testament research is the involvement of Jewish scholars. They perform the vital task of correcting Christian misunderstandings, distortions, stereotypes, and calumnies, with the aim of recovering the various Jewish contexts of Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement. This is a welcome development in the painful history of Jewish-Christian relations.
There is a danger, however, among Christians, of a kind of nostalgia for “Jewish roots”—an expectation that by closely examining Jesus’s original message, and “authentic” Jewish form of Christianity, one can bypass centuries of mistrust and worse. Matters are not that simple. Christianity grew out of a complex dual heritage: the Christian message quickly spread into the Greek-speaking world, and its adherents were soon majority Gentile. The implications of this are profound and already reflected in the New Testament.
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via Interesting Literature
On one of Dickinson’s great poems of friendship
‘I should not dare to leave my friend’ is one of Emily Dickinson’s great poems about friendship. Although she lived her life as a recluse in Amherst, Massachusetts, friendship mattered a great deal to Dickinson, as did family. In this poem, she revisits one of the perennial themes of her work – death, and the deathbed moments of the dying – but this time, from the perspective of a friend and comforter watching a loved one depart this mortal realm.
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via the New Statesman by Noel Malcom
How atheisms are imitating the religions they claim to reject.
In 1995 Richard Dawkins became the first ever “professor for the public understanding of science” at Oxford University. By the time he retired, 13 years later, it looked as if he had privately renegotiated his contract; for he was now functioning as Oxford’s very own professor for the public misunderstanding of religion.
In The God Delusion (2006) he argued that the existence of God was a scientific hypothesis which was almost – almost – demonstrably false. Miracles were scientifically impossible (yes, professor, I think we knew that: the clue was in the word “miracles”). And the creation story in the Book of Genesis was very bad science indeed. Opposing the stupidities of modern “creationism”, and all the other pseudo-scientific or anti-scientific dogmas of the fundamentalists, is one thing. Criticising the moral evils committed by religious fanatics is another, and no less worthwhile. Yet to treat religion itself as merely a defective form of science is a strangely crude error, rather like thinking that poetry is just a way of conveying factual statements that are to be tested for their truth or falsehood.
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via Boing Boing by Jason Weisberger
It is irrelevant that the planet Uranus stinks like rotten eggs, the atmosphere will kill humans very, very quickly.
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But it looks beautiful!
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Amia Srinivasan in the New York Review of Books
All men are created equal—but in what sense equal? Obviously not in the sense of being endowed with the same attributes, abilities, wants, or needs: some people are smarter, kinder, and funnier than others; some want to climb mountains while others want to watch TV; and some require physical or emotional support to do things that others can do on their own. And presumably they are not “equal” in the sense of demanding identical treatment: a father can give aspirin to his sick child and not his healthy one without disrespecting the equality of his children. Rather, all humans are said to be equal in what philosophers call the “basic,” “abstract,” “deep,” or “moral” sense of equality. We are all, in some fundamental sense, and despite our various differences, of equal worth, demanding, in Ronald Dworkin’s famous phrase, “equal concern and respect.”
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via About History by Alcibiades
Tiberius Julius Caesar was the second Roman Emperor and ruler from 14 – 37. Christ was crucified during his rule. Tiberius was the first child in the family of Tiberius Claudius Nero, who belonged to the branch of an ancient patrician family. Father Tiberius supported the Republicans and fought against Octavian. In the year 39 BC, Octavian proclaimed an amnesty, and Tiberius’ parents were able to return to Rome. Octavian fell in love and married Tiberius’ mother Livia and made her divorce her husband. Thanks to the second marriage of his mother, Tiberius became the stepchild of the most powerful man in the Roman Empire.
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via Big Think by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez
As human beings we all must do some work for basic survival – but how much? Is there a “minimum daily requirement” of work? A number of diverse sources – studies ranging from hunter-gatherer cultures to modern history – would place this figure at about three hours a day during an adult lifetime.
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via Interesting Literature
‘Gerontion’ is notable for being the only English poem in T. S. Eliot’s second volume of poetry (the collection also contained some French poems) which does not adopt the regular quatrain form found in ‘A Cooking Egg’, ‘Sweeney Erect’, ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, and ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. (There was another non-quatrain English poem, about a honeymoon night gone terribly wrong and titled simply ‘Ode’, in the original printing of the volume but Eliot was not happy with it and removed it from later editions.)
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