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revdorothyl at 11:50am on 13/03/2009
revdorothyl at 11:50am on 13/03/2009[new Spike/Captain John icon courtesy of Rahirah's fertile brain]
A co-worker just told me she and a friend will be attending this event in Roswell on July 3-5 (apparently as part of attending the larger UFO Festival in Roswell), in order to hear what their 'expert panel' has to say.
I'm assuming my co-worker and her friend will be attending in a semi-undercover capacity (my co-worker's research interest is the use/abuse of biblical archaeology in pop culture, but her eyes are already sparkling at the thought of the material for mockery she'll have once the 'expert panel' have aired their views).
Personally, I'm relieved to see that one of the Doctor of Ministry degrees claimed by the featured experts at this symposium is honorary (from a school I've never heard of), and that the other was apparently earned from a school I've never heard of.
I'd have felt bad if there were any real Master of Divinity or Doctor of Ministry degrees from seminaries or divinity schools I actually respect among the presenters, or if the single PhD in Hebrew Bible (or at least Semitic Languages) had authored more than a fictional thriller on this topic.
Come to think of it, most of the published works cited by this panel seem to be of the fictional sort. Interesting.
Of course, all the hype and really abysmal biblical scholarship on the "Alien Resistance" organization's website aside, perhaps this panel might actually have some interesting things to say on the subject of our culture's ambivalent relationship to science and religion, and to the supernatural and extra-terrestrial. It COULD happen.
A co-worker just told me she and a friend will be attending this event in Roswell on July 3-5 (apparently as part of attending the larger UFO Festival in Roswell), in order to hear what their 'expert panel' has to say.
I'm assuming my co-worker and her friend will be attending in a semi-undercover capacity (my co-worker's research interest is the use/abuse of biblical archaeology in pop culture, but her eyes are already sparkling at the thought of the material for mockery she'll have once the 'expert panel' have aired their views).
Personally, I'm relieved to see that one of the Doctor of Ministry degrees claimed by the featured experts at this symposium is honorary (from a school I've never heard of), and that the other was apparently earned from a school I've never heard of.
I'd have felt bad if there were any real Master of Divinity or Doctor of Ministry degrees from seminaries or divinity schools I actually respect among the presenters, or if the single PhD in Hebrew Bible (or at least Semitic Languages) had authored more than a fictional thriller on this topic.
Come to think of it, most of the published works cited by this panel seem to be of the fictional sort. Interesting.
Of course, all the hype and really abysmal biblical scholarship on the "Alien Resistance" organization's website aside, perhaps this panel might actually have some interesting things to say on the subject of our culture's ambivalent relationship to science and religion, and to the supernatural and extra-terrestrial. It COULD happen.
(no subject)
It's kind of sweet, in a clinically insane way...
(no subject)
However, even a cursory google of "Ezekiel and UFO" and "Bible and UFO" turned up a surprisingly large number of sites devoted to the "Touched by an Alien" side of the argument.
(I stole that line from a paper presentation at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature and the American Academy of Religion back in 1997. I forget which paper we were discussing -- perhaps it was the paper on the "Aliens" movies and religion, or a less memorable one on TV/movies and religion -- but a presenter made an off-hand comment about the short-lived TV show starring John Corbett, "The Visitor", and how it might just as well be titled "Touched by an Alien", since it merely substituted alien abductees for the dead-humans-turned-into-angels heroes of another long-running TV show.)