First, let’s start off with a folly. A rumor has it that Robert Pattinson may take over the role of Marvel super-hero Spider-Man, which Tobey Maguire is vacating. My gut response to that is “NO, NO, NO!! Please God don’t let it be so!!!!” But that could just be an overreaction on my part; it is after all just a rumor for now. 
Second, on to the forum. Just a reminder that The Hogshead now has a forum. We’re up to 42 registered members and over 70 topics. Some of the more recent topics and active ones are on Wandless Magic, A Topic for Strange Potter Questions, Books Read in 2010, Humor in Chamber of Secrets, Opera, and Should the Potter Movies Have Been Made, among many others. Please feel free to check out the forum and get involved.
On her blog Quoth the Maven, Janet Batchler has some great comments regarding who is the hero of Harry Potter: Harry Potter or Dumbledore. She’s responding to a story here arguing that Dumbledore is the real hero of the HP series not Harry. Check out both and see what you think.
When I started sending out book proposals over a year ago for God and Harry at Yale, part of me never believed that I was up to the task of writing a book. Books are long. They have chapters and indexes and titles. They take an awful lot of time and you have to fill up an awful lot of pages, and as I stared at the blank computer screen in front of me, I just didn’t think it would happen.
Until I was about three-quarters of the way through the draft, a part of me was sur that God and Harry at Yale would never be a reality. I had so much evidence to back my claim up: I’d never written a book before; I only had ten weeks to complete a draft; I didn’t really know what I was doing because I’d never written a book before (ooh, did I say that already?). Yet sentence by sentence and page by page, I created one, because despite everything that made me think writing a book was too lofty a goal, I trusted a gut instinct, a belief that I could complete it.
Though this is a story about writing and not about God, it’s still a story about faith. People who possess faith in God, or for that matter anything else, may or may not have compelling evidence to support that belief (see last week’s post), but they believe nonetheless. For some people, that faith feels solid or feels like a given while for others, it becomes a journey full of questioning and doubt. [click to continue…]
So other classes may be suspended for Labor Day, but not ours! Today we’re going to discuss revelation. Not the Book of but how God is revealed to humans. (As an aside, one of my professors once told me to remember that the biblical book is the Book of Revelation, not Revelations. Now every time I hear someone say Revelations, I think, “Oh no!” and now you will too!)
Anyway, when Christians talk about revelation (not the Book of) they’re talking about how they receive knowledge about God that is authoritative. We all know how hard it is to get truthful knowledge about other things—enter Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise’s marriage—so imagine how much harder it is to evaluate what’s true when it comes to an ineffable, abstract, possibly-non-existent being! That’s why Christians have said there are several reliable places in which God is revealed. These vary slightly from denomination to denomination, but I am going to talk about four common ones here: Scripture, reason, tradition, and experience. Together they are known as the Methodist Quadrilateral, and they are commonly accepted sources in many traditions. [click to continue…]
Joivre on 
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