Hone Your Craft as a Biblical Scholar
The Database of Religious History (DRH) “is a massive, standardized, searchable encyclopedia of the current best scholarly opinion on historical religious traditions and the historical record more generally.”
Much of the challenge the DRH tries to address is the volume of scholarly literature being produced on religious history and the difficulty of keeping current with it all.
Cal Newport reflects on the possibility of deleterious effects of social media on religious practice.
In part, he comments:
Courage, reassurance, revelation: these require a quiet mind capable of apophatic insight. One of the unintentional consequences of innovating an algorithmically-optimized, always-present source of attention-snagging noise is that this quiet disappears.
For more, see Cal’s original post or Digital Minimalism.
CSNTM preserves some new manuscripts currently kept in Texas, including a thus-far-unregistered manuscript still under review by INTF.
Recently, I noted that an English Standard Version audio Bible was freely available with registration at Bible.is. This version’s Old Testament is also still freely available in MP3 format on Amazon.
In addition to these, Logos Bible Software is now giving away the ESV audio Bible read by David Cochran Heath. This resource “is available for streaming only and cannot be stored on your device. A reliable internet connection is required for use,” but it does sync “word-for-word” with the Logos ESV text.
Other noteworthy, upcoming Logos resources include:
The latest issue of Currents in Biblical Research includes the following:
Jim Davila notes a report of a new German bill that explicitly permits the continued practice of infant male circumcision on religious grounds. The legality of the practice in Germany had been thrown into question by a related decision by the Cologne court earlier this year.