Jim West tagged me with the “one book” meme. I put off doing it for a while—because in all these categories it’s so hard to choose just one book—and then when I finished the post, Blogger would not publish anything. Now that all my publishing is centralized in my own webspace, I’ll try this again.

1. One book that changed your life:
Time Management for Dummies by Jeffrey Mayer

2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson

3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Guide by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

4. One book that made you laugh:
Dave Barry Slept Here by Dave Barry

5. One book that made you cry:
The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis

6. One book that you wish had been written:
The Autobiography of Jesus of Nazareth

7. One book that you wish had never been written:
I’m tempted to say “the gospel of John, so we wouldn’t have to deal with any of this trinitarian nonsense,” but instead I’ll go with Of Pandas and People

8. One book you’re currently reading:
Making Wise the Simple by Johanna W. H. Van Wijk-Bos

9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
Ingrid Hjelm’s book on Jerusalem that Jim sent me

10. Now tag five people:
Well, the people I would normally tag with such a thing have already been tagged. I’ll go off the beaten biblioblog path … let’s see if Richard Beck, Grete Scott, Wendy Barras, Ginger Dillon, and/or Frank Emanuel are reading this …

Welcome, dear readers, to the new Higgaion. I have finally grown so frustrated with Blogger’s technical issues and boilerplate responses to problems that I have decided to switch over to WordPress. If you have Higgaion bookmarked and your bookmark ends in “index.htm,” if you’ll just edit the bookmark to remove everything after “higgaion/,” you should be fine. I’m not sure of the effect the change will have on RSS feeds, though I hope the transition will prove to be seamless. If you want to read some of my older posts, for any inexplicable reason, please visit the old site, whose archives should still be available.

The other night I listened to an interesting episode of the American Public Media radio program “Speaking of Faith.” The title of this episode was “Evolution and Wonder: Understanding Charles Darwin.” I encourage you to download and listen to the program. The show is not about understanding the science of evolution, but, as the subtitle says, understanding Darwin himself. Accordingly, the guest is James Moore co-author of the biography Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist.

The whole one-hour show is very much worth a listen, but here I want to mention just one of the things that intrigued me. According to Moore, Darwin thought that the theory of natural selection would serve as a kind of theodicy (although Moore did not use that term). This was not Darwin’s motive, of course, but he did seem to find some theological comfort in natural selection. By Moore’s account, Darwin was troubled by the idea, common in his day (and in some circles I don’t think it’s lost much ground) that God had predestined everything that takes place. Not only had God assigned individual people to specific “stations” and “lots” in life, but even if a fox ate a rabbit, it was widely thought that God had predetermined that that particular fox would eat that particular rabbit. In part as a result of his travels on the Beagle, which brought him into contact with people far removed from Britain, and perhaps in part stemming from his abhorrence of slavery, Darwin felt that a God who would predestine individual humans and animals for gruesome deaths was abnormally cruel. The thought that God had established natural laws, and created and superintended the world by means of those laws, however, proved comforting to Darwin. He thought that perhaps natural selection—as one instance of the operation of such natural laws—might defend God from charges of “predestinational cruelty.”

Danny Zacharias has an excellent and engaging post today on fundamentalism and the Middle East crisis. I commend it to your reading; it is worth your while.

I just stumbled across Paul Brians’s web page dedicated to correcting Common Errors in English. At the bottom of the actual list-of-errors page are links to a number of other useful resources. I might need to make this site required reading for all my classes.

I generally stay away from political topics on this blog, but an interesting synchronicity has shaken loose one comment. This morning on the radio I heard an interview with John W. Dean—yes, the John Dean of Watergate infamy—who opined that the Republican party of today, with its advocacy of big spending, federalization of everything in sight, and intrusion into private lives, was hardly recognizable as Republican to him, a self-described “Goldwater Republican.” In Dean’s view, what has changed since the Nixon years is that the Republican party, with its marriage to the Religious Right, has embraced authoritarianism—which used to be the antithesis of what the Republican party stood for.

I thought the interview and analysis were interesting, but I didn’t give them much additional thought throughout the day until I ran across this story in the New York Times. It seems that NASA’s mission has been, shall we say, “refocused” to better accord with the Bush administration’s priorities. NASA’s mission from 2002 to the present has been “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers … as only NASA can.” But now, in keeping with the Bush administration’s desire to avoid any serious engagement with issues of climate change and similar ecological issues, the opening phrase, “To understand and protect our home planet,” has been deleted.

I encourage you to read the Times article, in which NASA scientists explain why the deletion of “to understand and protect our home planet” from NASA’s mission has serious negative consequences.

Unfortunately, it is, as reported today by the Los Angeles Times. Denver has been playing host to the International Christian Retail Show, an expo of “Christian” products. Among the headliners in the LAT article:

The fake rose petals strewn across the tablecloth gave Milton Hobbs’ booth a romantic aura. He stacked crystal-cut perfume flasks in a pyramid and set out pink candles tied with ribbon. The effect was almost sexy — at least compared with the other booths at the International Christian Retail Show.

Hobbs liked it. He needed a striking display to call attention to his most unusual product.

“Christian perfume,” he said. “It’s a really, really new genre. We’re the first!”

Virtuous Woman perfume comes packaged with a passage from Proverbs. But what makes the floral fragrance distinctly Christian, Hobbs said, is that it’s supposed to be a tool for evangelism.

“It should be enticing enough to provoke questions: ‘What’s that you’re wearing?’ ” Hobbs said. “Then you take that opportunity to speak of your faith. They’ve opened the door, and now they’re going to get it.”

The sad thing is, this isn’t a parody or a Monty Python skit. These people are for real. Somehow, I just can’t bring myself to believe this is “making friends for yourselves from the mammon of unrighteousness”—because somehow I doubt that sexy perfume and lost golf balls are really going to make that much of an evangelistic difference in our world. They might, however, rank just above Jack Chick tracks in the end.

Now the truth is, I must admit, I’m as “consumerist” as the next person. I have a substantial music library downloaded from iTunes and quite a few DVDs (mostly purchased off the Blockbuster “3 for $20″ rack), I drop too much money on the Anachronism card game and D&D Miniatures, and I own Borg and Klingon teddy bears (although these were gifts). People selling stuff that other people want is not what gets to me here. Even the idea of thematic tie-ins is not what gets to me here. I’m a sucker for thematic tie-ins, as witness the teddy bears, my Hanukkah Pooh (a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh with a dreidel), and the amount of money I spent on Happy Meals getting Narnia toys for my sons. What gets to me is the pretense that somehow all of this “Christian retailing” is especially spiritual or evangelistic. Somehow, offering somebody a Testamint is supposed to be more “Christian” than offering them an Altoid, and wearing Virtuous Woman perfume to attract men’s attention is supposed to be more wholesome than the equally spirtually-named Dream Angels or Rapture (which, by the way, is my lovely wife’s preferred brand).

To my mind, this is nothing more than niche marketing to an increasingly well-off upper-middle-class of conservative evangelicals. And please, please, nobody give me a Jesus doll with WWID (‘What Would I Do?’) bracelet for my recently-celebrated (July 19th) birthday. Make it a tribble instead, if you would.

The topic seems to be a perennial biblioblog favorite: the relationship between events mentioned or described in biblical narrative and events that actually took place in the ancient Near East. Jim West recently took a swipe at a report out of Southwestern Seminary relative to the dig at Gezer, though I think you have to admit that the snipped Jim quoted makes an easy (maybe too easy?) target. Jim was also not too happy with a Baptist Press report on recent activity at Tel Gezer. Joe Cathey has responded to Jim’s posts (and makes a good point about Jim’s apparent double-standard as applied to Gath and Gezer). So far, the comments have actually been fairly predictable for anyone who has followed Jim’s and/or Joe’s blogs for any length of time.

One interesting development is that both Jim and Joe have applauded Duane Smith’s contribution to the conversation. That’s quite an accomplishment, Duane! I do, in all seriousness, recommend Duane’s post.

While I would like to comment more extensively on the debate by analyzing the press releases that triggered the most recent round of discussion, I am not really able to do so this afternoon. I will return to the issue, if time permits over the weekend or early next week. Let me just say for now that I think Jim and Joe are in some ways very nice correctives for one another. My own plea is that we should follow the evidence wherever it leads, whether that be in favor of affirming or denying the historical accuracy of this or that biblical narrative (and, by the way, I think such questions have to be approached on a cautious case-by-case basis; sweeping generalizations obscure important details). A naïve tendency to affirm the historical accuracy of biblical narratives despite contrary archaeological evidence is inappropriately uncritical, but so is a reactionary tendency to dismiss the historical accuracy of biblical narratives when they converge with archaeological evidence (and, just to dispel any ambiguity, I see more of the latter in Jim than I do of the former in Joe).

As time permits, I will go over and comment here on the Baptist Press and Southwestern Seminary reports to whatever extent they continue to pique my interest. For now, I leave you with the thought that denying that you need evidence and dismissing the available evidence are equally problematic.

Read the Jerusalem Post‘s initial report here.

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