In a way, there is a religious fundamentalist quality to this globe-denialism, and it occurred to me that there is a quasi-religious foundation for people’s stubborn belief in a flat earth. I’m no scientist, but I do know religion, and so into the fray I jumped with a video entitled “A Religious Argument Against the Flat Earth.”

My primary aim in this book was to put before the reader a presentation of different levels of translation for this sacred text. In so doing, I hoped to allow the reader to see the fundamental strangeness of the text and its familiarity at the same time, and come to see just what it is that I have come to love about Mark’s gospel.

On a recent road trip to through the South, I saw a series of billboards with religious message. These billboards were clearly part of a single theological viewpoint. And that theological viewpoint is terrible.

There is some embarrassment in the modern church about Christ the King Sunday. It’s viewed as patriarchal, monarchist, and imperialist: all the things that a good modern-day Christian should oppose. And we should. But there’s something missing from that understanding, and that’s that proclaiming Christ as King has always been a subversive act. 

Jesus responds to the Sadducees’ ingenuous question with solid legal analysis, theological understanding, and linguistic analysis. But even more than the deftness with which he deals with the Sadducees’ hypothetical, he teaches us a powerful lesson about God’s nature.