Educated at the University of Göttingen, Gunkel taught there and at Halle, Berlin, and Giessen. A leading member of the ”History of Religions school”, he stressed the literary values of the Old Testament by comparative study of the legends on which it draws, particularly in Genesis, Psalms and the Prophets, on which he published works in 1901, 1903, and 1917. Extending his researches beyond current dogmatic interpretations, he promoted the study on literary-historical lines of the religious history of Israel, publishing Die israelitische Literatur (1906; “The Literature of Israel”) and Die Urgeschichte und die Patriarchen (1911; “Earliest History and the Patriarchs”). He contributed Psalmen to the Göttinger Handkommentar zum Alten Testament (1910; “Göttingen Ready Reference Commentary on the Old Testament”), assisted in the first edition of the religious encyclopaedia Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1903–13; “Religion in History and the Present”), and was coeditor of the second edition (1927–32). Together with Wilhelm Bousset he founded the series Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten Testaments und des Neuen Testaments (1903– ; “Research into the Religion and Literature of the Old and New Testaments”).

Happy Gunkel Day!

I would love to see this game live.  I’ll be watching it- but oh to be there live….

Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics http://zite.to/Ze4Oo8 

Well he’s wrong.  NO ONE is saved by doing good.  No one.  The Pope has evidently never bothered to read Galatians 2-

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Paul is right- Francis is not.

There are really wonderful, decent, compassionate, sensible Muslims and they deserve our respect and they also deserve not to be lumped in with radical lunatics any more than Christians deserve to be lumped in with the hatemongers in our own midst.

Speaking in Paris alongside Francois Hollande, the French president, David Cameron says Britain has faced terror attacks such as the one in Woolwich before and adds: “We will never buckle in the face of it.”

The Telegraph is doing a brilliant job of moment by moment coverage of the horrific incident.  Keep tuned to that link- the latest news is on the top of the page with older entries as you scroll down.

Again, such barbarity is utterly unspeakable.  Inhuman really.  To butcher a man as one would an animal makes the one who does it less than an animal.

Armed police called to the scene near the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, London, shot and injured two suspects. Woolwich and Greenwich MP Nick Raynsford said both were in a serious condition in hospital. One witness, identified as James, said he and his partner saw two black men attack the young man with kitchen knives like he was “a piece of meat”. “They were hacking at this poor guy, literally,” he told LBC. “They were hacking at him, chopping him, cutting him.

Fighting back tears, he added: “These two guys were crazed. They were just animals. “They dragged him from the pavement and dumped his body in the middle of the road and left his body there.” He said that after the “horrendous” attack, the two men, in their 20s, just stood around, waving knives and a gun, even asking people nearby to take pictures of them “as if they wanted to be on TV or something”. “They were oblivious to anything, they were more worried about having their photo taken, running up and down the road,” he said. “They had no intention of running off or leaving or anything.

The supposition in Britain is that the perpetrators are Muslim and that their act was religiously motivated. If so, Islamic leaders across the civilized world need to denounce it in no uncertain terms.  Silence is acceptance.  And silence in the face of evil is itself evil.

I hope one and all will pray for this guy’s family and friends.  I suspect they will need all the help they can get- especially of the divine sort.

A modern reader might be surprised to learn that Hodge was not a biblical fundamentalist who defended a literal interpretation of Genesis. Although he was a biblical theologian, he accepted scientific evidence and interpreted the “days” of Genesis as geological ages, so biblical chronology played virtually no role in his critique of Darwinism. Like many of his contemporaries, he faulted Darwin’s theory on scientific and philosophical grounds; it wasn’t warranted by the available evidence, and it made implausible assumptions. But his principal objections were theological. First, although Darwin acknowledged that God may have originally breathed life “into a few forms or into one,” he attributed their subsequent evolution to autonomous natural forces instead of to God’s superintending providence. Hodge objected that Darwinism, in this respect, was a form of deism (the view that God created the world but then turned it loose to run by itself).

And more.  Enjoy.

German is awesome precisely because it ALWAYS sounds like yelling.  Even when it isn’t.

11. You get irrationally mad when you realize the internet is ruining students’ grammar.

That sort of thing is an automatic F.