I’ve been staying home sick with some horrible cough for about 3 weeks now.  One would think that this would be quite conducive to blogging, but when I’m running a fever I find it hard to concentrate enough to produce mental output.  (Mental input, like books and movies, is fine).

Fortuantely—either because of taking antibiotics, or for some other reason—I’m beginning to feel much better, so here’s a post, consisting of links which I’ve found interesting since the last time I did links:

• Of This and Other Worlds blogs on the Problem of Susan in the Narnia books.  The Superversive adds some interesting personal testimony.
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• A New York Times article on computer software that supposedly grades essays.  Anyone who thinks that computer programs can substitute for human graders is completely misinformed about the point of essays.  Which is always to communicate some sort of meaning through organized thought.  This is something that no computer can do, prior to the development of some actual AI overlords.  The best it could possibly do is check for pretentious vocabulary, correct bad grammar (badly) and enforce meaningless and stupid rules about how many paragraphs there must be.   No machine could possibly check for the presence of an interesting thesis supported by coherent argument based on plausible evidence.  There are probably some things you could measure which are corollated with being a good writer, but even this will cease once students learn how to flatter the machine.
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  The sad thing is that there are probably human teachers who grade this superficially.  Although, even they could probably tell if the sentences didn’t actually fit together in any way (besides beginning with words like “Moreover”).
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  Out of curiosity, I just went and checked the webpage of the discern program to see what their alogorithm was.  It’s machine learning based on sample essays which are already graded.  Oh my.  That means neither the student nor the classroom instructor will even know what criterion the machine is using.
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• What St. Lewis (in his capacity as a literary scholar) thought of the Puritans.
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• You’ve probably heard how the first man in space, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, said that didn’t enocunter God there.  As if God were literally located in the sky.  Well, it turns out, the whole story was a Soviet lie; St. Yuri was an Orthodox Christian.  More details here.
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• A haunting article, by and about a woman who acts the part of a sick patient for medical students.  This is one of the best written narratives I’ve read in quite some time.
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• An interesting (and to me inspiring) letter from missionary St. Anthony Norris Groves (1795-1853) to crankish schismatic (St?) John Nelson Darby (1800-1882) on the topic of Christian unity.
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  Darby was one of the first people to teach that Christians would be raptured into heaven 7 years prior to the Second Coming of Christ, a belief almost completely unheard of prior to Darby.  This is part of a detailed scheme called Dispensationalism, popular in American Fundamentalist circles, which is based on that idea that apparent contradictions in the Bible should be resolved by assigning different texts to one of seven different covenants or “dispensations” in which God treats people differently.  This way of thinking leads them to construct an elaborate timeline of End Times events (a suprise Rapture, followed by 7 years of Tribulation, followed by the Second Coming, followed by 1000 years of The Milennium [this one at least has a  foundation in a literal reading of the Book of Revelation], and then finally the Final Judgement).  Oddly enough, people think that this elaborate scheme comes from reading the Bible literally as a fundamentalist should, even though no one who read the Bible without influence from Darby would ever come to this elaborate scheme on their own.
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  More relevantly to this letter, Darby went on to found a small denomination of his own which excommunicated nearly everybody else.
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• St. Maxime is a Stylite monk with a much better way to isolate himself from the World.  Make sure to click through the slide show.
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• An article about my grand-advisor (i.e. the Ph.D. advisor of Ted Jacobson, my advisor) Cécile DeWitt-Morette.
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• An article on the simplicity of God (hint: it doesn’t mean that he is easy to understand).  Consider me firmly in the “classical theism” camp.  I consider the idea that God is just a person like us, but pure spirit and infinitely powerful etc., to be idolatrous.  True, we humans are the image of God.  The converse is not true: God is not to be conceived as being in our image.
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• The New York magazine interviews St. Antonin Scalia.  There was an interesting moment where Scalia brings up that he believes in the Devil.  The interviewer acts a bit incredulous, and asks:

Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

• I’ve always thought there was something silly about the librarian festival “banned books week”, and this post by St. Darwin explains why.

• The Game Crafter, a website for designing and selling your own board games.

• However, there’s no need to buy games on the web.  If you can afford index cards, and a pencil, then you can start playing The Card Game, a self-modifying card game invented by yours truly.

• Legal Systems Very Different from Ours, a very interesting online book draft.

• From St. William G. Witts’ blog, an essay on A Hermeneutic of Discontinuity, a take-down some supposedly “Christian” theologians, who actually don’t really believe much of anything.  I was particularly interested in the following passage because of my recent posts on Metaphors in Theology:

The primary criterion by which Borg decides whether an event mentioned in the Bible is historical or metaphorical seems to be whether it is miraculous, or mentions what Borg refers to as an “intervention” of God. As with many authors in our narrative of the “hermeneutics of discontinuity,” Borg is clear that contemporary people cannot believe that miracles happen, so any biblical story that contains such an event must be interpreted as a metaphor. For example, Borg writes that the biblical description of Jesus as the Son of God who died for our sins and rose from the dead “no longer works for millions of people.” Also, he writes, “there are many parts of the gospels that they can’t take literally. When literalized, the story of Jesus becomes literally incredible.”  Of course, that millions of contemporary people do take the miraculous events of the gospel “literally” belies Borg’s claim. For those who believe, the story of Jesus is literally credible. That is what the word “belief” means.

The approach here is entirely circular and question begging. Borg nowhere makes an argument that miracles are metaphysically impossible, or that the God who created the world could not become incarnate, or that if Jesus were the Son of God that he could not forgive sins or rise from the dead. Nor does he engage in a careful textual study to show that the biblical texts themselves distinguish between non-miraculous “historical events” and miraculous “metaphorical” events. The distinction between a “literal” and a “metaphorical” reading is assumed in approaching the text and then imposed on it.

Moreover, Borg’s is an odd use of the word “metaphor,” which normally means “figurative,” not miraculous. Presumably, a secular account of undisputed and non-miraculous historical events could use highly metaphorical language, and might have a great deal of contemporary significance or “meaning,” for example, a biography of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr. At the same time, an account of an entirely fantastic and fictional event could use non-metaphorical and prosaic language. For example, tall tales about Paul Bunyan often derive their humor from describing highly exaggerated and impossible stories in prosaic language. It is not clear why Borg wants to use the expression “metaphorical” to describe certain events in the Bible except to say that “they did not happen.”

People have a bad habit of using the word “metaphorical” to mean “just kidding”.  But that’s just not what it means.  Nor does “literal” mean factual.  For example, when reading a novel we understand that “Mr. Jones went out the door” can be a literal statement, while “Mrs. Jones’ heart was broken” is a metaphor.  The Literal vs. Metaphorical axis lies at right angles to the Factual vs. Fictional axis; all four combinations are allowed.

There’s an interview of me in the July edition of the BioLogos newsletter.

Also, I’ve been going back and forth about whether to mention this, but as long as I’m going on about myself, it turns out that I won the Bergmann-Wheeler thesis prize which was awarded at the GR20 conference in Warsaw.  The prize was sponsored by the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity, which I have sometimes published in, although all of my articles are also freely available on the arXiv, of course.  The prize was awarded for my proof of the Generalized Second Law for black holes.  In light of all the other excellent work out there, I feel deeply honored be recongnized in this way.

I have also added St. Martin LaBar of Sun and Shield to my blog roll.  Not only does he blog about both scientific and theological topics, he also is a role model in that he always takes a moderate and gentle tone, even with commenters who disagree with him.  His consistent tone of encouragement is commendable.