I took my parents and my ten-year-old son to the historic El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood last night to see Disney’s newest movie, Bolt. In case you haven’t heard, Bolt follows the adventures of the title character, a dog who stars in an action-adventure television show but doesn’t realize it, since the producers have conditioned him to think it’s all real. Bolt accidentally gets shipped from Hollywood to New York, and then has to make his way cross-country to get back to his person, Penny (who also stars in the television show). Assisted by street-smart alley cat Mittens and a hero-worshipping hamster named Rhino, Bolt learns how to be a real dog in the real world.

I really enjoyed this movie, and plan to see it again with my five-year-old son, who was too sick to go with us last night (poor kid). The storyline doesn’t hit audiences with any big surprises, but certainly kept me engaged and entertained through the film. We saw the film in Disney Digital 3D, and the 3D effects felt very natural. The filmmakers didn’t attempt to hit the audience over the head with 3D stuff jumping out of the screen; it just felt like watching an almost holographic movie. Bolt carries a PG rating due chiefly to the cartoon-action violence in the scenes from Bolt’s television show. Those scenes could prove a bit too scary to young children. As the father of a five-year-old boy, a boy with pronounced copycat tendencies, I tend to listen carefully for profanity and such; if memory serves, the most objectionable word I heard in the dialogue was “butt” (referring to a person’s posterior, not to cigarette detritus). I didn’t detect any gratuitous profanity thrown in to get the PG rating, nor any gratuitous sexual innuendos.

As an added bonus, Bolt runs with the Cars short Tokyo Mater, also presented in 3D. All of us had great fun watching Mater participate in a Tokyo street race.

In short, I recommend Bolt for a night of good family fun.

Jared posted a fun little piece on board games recently; long-time readers will recall that I love games of all sorts. One quotation that Jared selected from the Times of London mentioned the ancient Egyptian board game Senet; I have a reproduction Senet set as well as a reproduction of the Sumerian game unearthed by Sir Leonard Wooley in his excavations of Ur. I think I got both of those during a visit to the Oriental Institute in Chicago.

My son gave me the new, updated version of Risk for my 41st birthday. Nowadays, the game features three different sets of rules (for different game durations), cities, capitals, objectives, and rewards. The revised system for trading in cards for armies balances the game much better. My son, my father, and I have played several games since my parents arrived here for a visit on Christmas day.

My sister’s family sent Blokus with my parents as a Christmas gift to my family, and we’ve found it quite entertaining. Each of four players receives a pile of colored tiles, each tile containing one to five squares (think of Tetris shapes, but in more varied sizes and configurations). The players then take turns placing pieces on the board (following certain rules), each trying to place all of his or her own pieces. The game scores “negatively”: when the game ends, you get –1 point for each square still left on the pieces you couldn’t play, and the player with the highest (probably negative) score wins. The game plays best with two or four players; you must employ some semi-klunky workarounds if you have only three, but the rules even offer an interesting solo variation. Even my five-year-old enjoys it.

Today, December 27, marks the 2008 observance of the Feast of St. John the Evangelist (not to be confused with John the Baptist). One of the traditional observances involves toasting one another with St. John’s wine and the blessing, “Drink the love of St. John.” We tee-totallers have a hard time observing this tradition. For the rest of you, here’s the traditional blessing over St. John’s wine:

Blessed art Thou, Lord God, who fillest the hungry and satisfiest the thirsty, And givest us wine to gladden our hearts. Grant that all who drink this wine in remembrance of Saint John may rejoice in Thee and be invited to sit at Thy heavenly banquet for ever and ever. Amen.

Do you suppose this blessing works on Diet Coke? Or maybe on תירוש?

As a child, I grew up with the very common misconception that the twelve days of Christmas began on December 14 and ended with Christmas Day, December 25. Actually, Christmas Day marks the first day of Christmas, and the twelve days of Christmas span the period from Christmas Day until January 5, culminating in Epiphany on January 6.

The second day of Christmas, December 26, also marks the Feast of St. Stephen. Christians (Protestants, at least) normally remember Stephen as the “first Christian martyr,” but his feast emphasizes his leadership role in the first organized Christian charity. Accordingly, one traditionally celebrates the Feast of St. Stephen through acts of charity.

In the USA, we have many opportunities for Christmastime charity, but due to the rhythms of our civil year, these mostly come in the runup to Christmas Day rather than on the Feast of St. Stephen as such. We usually spend the Feast of St. Stephen shopping the after-Christmas sales. If you’re out shopping the after-Christmas sales today, perhaps you can add some clothing or a child’s toy to your shopping list, and donate those to a local charity; maybe you’ve already honored the Feast of St. Stephen a few days early by giving to Toys for Tots or the Salvation Army. For us, giving little girls’ toys to Toys for Tots does double duty; we honor the spirit of Christian charity and the memory of our daughters who died in utero.

And just in case you’ve forgotten, the carol about “Good King Wenceslas” really pertains not to Christmas Day, but to the Feast of St. Stephen.

Today, December 25, Christians everywhere celebrate the birth of Jesus, an event of profoundest significance for our religion. If you don’t remember that story, you can read all about it in Luke 1:1–2 and Matthew.

In the USA, Christmas also serves as a quasi-secular holiday, an occasion for chocolate, peppermint, and gift-giving. My (“nuclear”) family observes both aspects of the day. However you choose to celebrate (or not) Christmas day, I hope that joy and peace characterize this last week of December for you.

I suppose I found the glosses on Genesis 6:1–6 by Scott Bailey, Jim West, and Claude Mariottini mildly entertaining. I suppose. And I realize that perhaps one shouldn’t take these sorts of parodies too seriously—just as one shouldn’t try to learn about Babylonian religion from Deutero-Isaiah. But I just can’t help myself.

Amused or not, I found the exchange confusing (or confused) with regard to the connections all three versions drew between historico-philosophical periods and the maximalist/minimalist categories bandied about in biblical studies. On the one hand, Scott and Jim associate maximalists with the Enlightenment, while on the other, Claude associates minimalists with postmodernity. This seems to me precisely backwards.

I have not yet quite figured out what Scott and Jim mean by “the sons of historicism,” particularly the word “historicism.” The many different possible meanings one may attach to that term make the word almost useless. Until someone corrects me, I will have to regard the term “historicist” here as roughly synonymous with “maximalist,” and I will have to attribute to it the sense, “one who attributes to biblical narratives a high degree of historical reliability.” But this fundamentalist/historicist/maximalist cluster hardly seems to me to describe an “Enlightenment-influenced” way of thinking. Undoubtedly, all contemporary biblical scholars have felt the Enlightenment’s influence, mostly in ways that I would consider good. However, part of the Enlightenment ethos involved casting off religious authority and elevating an individual’s own reason(ing) over against received tradition. I don’t see how this especially applies to the so-called maximalists. Christian fundamentalism, indeed, grew precisely from a rejection of the fruits of the Enlightenment and its heir, modernity. Maximalism vests biblical narratives with epistemic authority as an outgrowth of the Bible’s traditional religious authority, and suspects that if the free exercise of reason contradicts the biblical sources, then that reason has somehow gone astray. I see more of the Renaissance (ad fontes) than of the Enlightenment (sapere aude) here.

Claude’s linkage of minimalism with postmodernism likewise befuddles me. Admittedly, Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives” (my apologies for omitting the precise citation, but my copies of Lyotard’s works sit snugly in a cardboard box somewhere in Pepperdine’s warehouse at the moment), and one might see in some maximalist rhetoric an incredulity toward what one might call the biblical metanarrative. But if, as Claude says in his “translation notes,” minimalists “say that only evidence can prove truth,” then minimalists stand very firmly on modernist—specifically, positivist or empiricist—ground. Yet postmodernist philosphers tend to reject positivism (for many different reasons, and with many different arguments).

Maximalists bear more resemblance to pre-Enlightenment or postmodern thinkers than to Enlightenment thinkers, not least by putting tradition and testimony on a par with (other forms of) hard evidence. Minimalists bear more resemblance to the modernist heirs of the Enlightenment, not least by (positivistically) insisting on hard evidence perceptible to the senses.

Perhaps this exercise would prove most useful if I were to offer some biblical analogies of my own. Forget Genesis 6:1–6 (well, not entirely, but for the purposes of this discussion). Instead, take as the maximalists’ credo Psalm 44:2 (44:1 in English versions):

We have heard with our ears, O God,
     our ancestors have told us,
what deeds you performed in their days,
     in the days of old.

And take as the minimalists’ credo Deuteronomy 19:15b:

Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a [claim] be sustained.

Jews all over the world lit their first Hanukkah candle of 2008 at sundown last night, December 21. For those few of you who don’t know, Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the temple in Jerusalem after the Maccabean revolutionaries wrested control thereof from the Syrian Greeks ruled by Antiochus IV Epiphanies. You can read all about it in the book we call 1 Maccabees; Protestants like me may have to hunt for 1 Maccabees in the “Apocrypha” section of their Bibles (if you have the good fortune of a Bible with the Apocrypha printed therein—if not, buy yourself one for Christmas). As a Christian, I did not grow up celebrating Hanukkah; my Restorationist/primitivist/biblicist Sunday school teachers did not see it in the Bible (most of them didn’t realize that Jesus celebrated Hanukkah), so I really only learned about it as an adult. However you choose to spend the eight days of Hanukkah, I hope you find them filled with joy and light.

Last week, I blogged about reading the BHS in Olive Tree‘s BibleReader software for iPhone. At that time, I promised to bring you more information about searching the BHS on the iPhone.

Because of the limited screen space and the lack of native Hebrew support on the iPhone OS, Olive Tree has had to get creative with Hebrew searching. While viewing any text in BibleReader, you can invoke the search function by tapping the magnifying glass at the bottom of the screen. Since the iPhone does not currently support a Hebrew keyboard, BibleReader gives you a quasi-keyboard that you invoke by tapping the “Gk/Heb” button.

Due to some issues with iPhone text display, the string you build appears backward—left-to-right—at the top of the screen. However, when you tap “Done” to return to the search screen, BibleReader will correct the direction for you. When you execute your search (by tapping “Search” on the search screen), BibleReader will identify the “hits” for you, and will highlight your search term.

At present, you cannot do a second search within your search results.

If I understand correctly, the search function currently relies on simple pattern matching. Thus, if you search for קום, the search engine returns only literal instances of qoph-vav-mem, not inflected forms like יקם and הקמתי and so on. Olive Tree wants to provide more robust searching, but progress happens one step at a time. We’re a long way from Accordance or Logos here, but for a quick lookup, even the current beta of BibleReader provides a good on-the-go tool. By the time Olive Tree is ready to release the BHS to the App Store, the search tool should be even better.

Everybody makes mistakes. Some of us are professionals at it.

— Tigger, during today’s episode of My Friends Tigger and Pooh

I no longer have an office.

Don’t get me wrong; Pepperdine provides me with room in which to store my books, work between classes, visit with students and colleagues, and so on. However, since moving day represents a kind of fresh start, I hereby resolve not to speak of that room as my office, but rather as my study.

My new study has been used many times in the past for other things, and frankly, it’s pretty beaten up. Since I will get a new study in August 2009, I cannot expect any cosmetic improvements to this one. Instead of moving over my desk and other furniture (except bookcases) from AC 201, I decided simply to use some of the furniture—the black stuff you can see in the photo below—that was already in PLC 101D. The photo immediately below shows my new desk area; you can roll your mouse over various objects to get more information about them.

For the next few months, I have to work with a stripped-down version of my personal library. Roll your mouse over the bookshelves to see what I kept out.

Of course, I’ve only been in my new study two days, so some things remain unpacked or disorganized.

Drop on by for a housewarming party sometime.