This semester I have a class of 50 in my Religious Studies 1201 course: Introduction to Religion. For our final exam we are doing essays integrating the content of these six programs from the PBS “Closer to Truth” series with Dr. Robert L. Kuhn. You can watch these and many…
I regularly get queries from readers asking whether my university courses are on-line or available to the public. Although during this “year of Covid” I have been teaching on-line–and will next semester–registering requires admission and enrollment through the university, with normal tuition payments–which I think is not what most people…
As most of you know, I have taught in the Department of Religious Studies since coming to UNC Charlotte in 1989, as well as serving as Chair of the Department for 10 years (2004-2014). If you haven’t been keeping up with the amazing and explosive growth of UNC Charlotte (30,000…
I want to put in a good word this Sunday morning for Professor Bart Ehrman’s blog–my fellow New Testament scholar down the road at UNC Chapel Hill. Unlike other blogs out there you have to “pay” to read it–beyond the tantalizing leads that non-members can access. The cost is modest…
I recently wrote a post titled “Do Historians Exclude the Supernatural?” Here I want to explore a related issue that one often hears from a variety of circles also having to do with methods of the academic study of religions–how scholars evaluate ancient texts–and here I will particularly focus on…
The investigative task of the ancient historian is by definition an interpretive one and no interpretation is without predisposition or even prejudgment stemming from known or unknown proclivities of both a personal and contextual nature. Add to this the paucity of our incomplete evidence, whether textual or material, and there…