Christmas 2018 saw the 200th anniversary of the carol Silent Night. Martin Clarke, Lecturer in Music at The Open University explores its musical and lyrical content, as well as its key role in the Christmas truce on the Western Front in 1914.
Few Christmas carols evoke the season of peace and goodwill as readily as Silent Night. Two popular stories contribute to its appeal: one concerning the circumstances of its composition in Oberndorf, near Salzburg in Austria, and the other its role in the Christmas Truce of 1914 when the opposing forces walked out of their trenches to greet their enemies and share food and drink.
But its lyrical and musical content are also important factors in understanding its enduring popularity, and Christmas Eve 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of its...
A famous letter by Albert Einstein which expresses his thoughts about God, the Bible and Judaism, was sold at auction for $3 million this week. The letter had been expected to sell for half the price.
Writing to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, Einstein’s thoughts on religion are essentially negative. He writes: ’The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.’
The letter has been previously described (by the New York Times) as ‘pouring gasoline on the culture wars between science and religion’.
Writing in the Guardian, Harriet Sherwood comments: ‘The sentence has been hailed as evidence that the physicist, one of the 20th century’s...
An ancient copper ring unearthed in Israel 50 years ago, but which has only just been cleaned and examined, may once have belonged to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor who sentenced Jesus to death, archaeologists have announced.
The ring, which was discovered in 1968 in the ruins of the Herodium, the palace of King Herod the Great, near Bethlehem, shows a wine vessel surrounded by the Greek letters of a word translated as ‘Pilatus’. The ring would have been used to seal official documents, and archaeologists believe it may have belonged either to Pilate himself, or to an aide in his office, sealing letters on his behalf.
The discovery has excited interest because this is only the second artifact ever discovered to carry the name of Pilate. The other is a stone block bearing a...
An ancient copy of a long-forgotten religious newspaper from the time of the First World War, which was recently sent to us, reveals attitudes towards prayer and ‘this terrible war’.
We recently received a rather battered copy of a religious newspaper, The Christian Age, just over a century after it was published. The copy had languished in the loft of a house in St Kevenrne, Cornwall, until the house’s current owner, Jim Dowling, came across it while the loft was being renovated. The newspaper, which was published in December 1915, at the height of the First World War, is a time capsule of Edwardian news and comment, with one article sharing the secret of staying warm in the winter weather. ‘According to Arctic explorers, anything containing fat, such as chocolate, butter, or bacon,...
Our online video of the Drawbridge Lecture, which was delivered in May this year by Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, is now available with Portuguese subtitles. The lecture, ‘Unknowns in Heaven and Earth’, focuses on Professor Gleiser’s vision of science as a deeply human endeavour, exploring the unknowns of the universe.
This Portuguese version was put together by Luiz Antônio Melo, an undergraduate physics student at the University of Santa Cruz in Brazil. Marcelo Gleiser himself was born in Rio de Janeiro.
Says Luiz: ‘I’m an enthusiast of science, and I have a deep admiration for professor Marcelo’s work. I think it is very important to spread the knowledge of science, especially in my country.’
Earlier this year, the oldest known fragment of the Gospel of Mark was finally published, some 115 years since it was unearthed in a long-forgotten Egyptian rubbish dump in what was once the city of Oxyrhynchus. The small scrap of papyrus was discovered by two British archaeologists in about 1903, along with half a million other bits and pieces chucked out in ancient times, including receipts, private letters, shopping lists, tax returns, poems and pages from books. Scholars have been working ever since, for over a century, to identify and publish this mountain of ancient texts.
The fragment of Mark’s Gospel, known as Papyrus 137 (or P137), has something of a notorious modern history. In 2012, it became famous when a scholar sensationally claimed that Papyrus 137 had been written in the...
The book Seven Types of Atheism, by the British philosopher and atheist John Gray, and published earlier this year, looks at first glance like a field guide to godlessness. Gray distinguishes and explores the branches of atheism ancient and modern, from the old atheists of the Enlightenment through to the New Atheists of the recent past, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, whom he describes as ‘mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment’. That comment immediately tells you that Gray’s book is not merely a field guide (although it is that too, and a very enjoyable one), but also a polemic against the types of atheism Gray thinks are too much in debt to religion.
Gray’s antipathy to the New Atheists generally and Richard Dawkins in particular has been...
The Drawbridge Lecture 2018, delivered by Marcelo Gleiser, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College, is now available as an online video. Click above for the complete lecture, followed by discussion and audience questions.
The lecture, ‘Unknowns in Heaven and Earth’, focused on Professor Gleiser’s concept of science as a deeply human endeavour, exploring the unknowns of the universe. He sees science as a human project of exploration, rather than a method by which a grand unified theory will eventually be discovered. He told the audience that in all likelihood we will never get to the bottom of some of the mysteries of the universe, not because we don’t know enough, but because they are by definition unknowable.
Quoting Einstein and Heisenberg, he said that the study...
A frequent argument of new atheists is that religion is intrinsically violent. But the writings, interviews and soundbites of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens reveals their surprising willingness to sign up to the politics of violence, says Nick Megoran. (Republished from The Conversation.)
Celebrity atheists such as Richard Dawkins appear to claim the moral high ground when it comes to violence. Dawkins, along with Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, insist that because religion is intrinsically violent, then atheism is inherently more pacific. After all, if all the evils in the world can be blamed on religion, then arguably eliminating religion is not only desirable but a moral obligation for atheists who believe in peace.
‘I believe because it is absurd’ is a saying that has been pinned on Tertullian, the early Christian writer, even though he never said it. Peter Harrison follows the story of this fake quote, which has a long history in anti-religious polemic.
Religious belief is often thought to evince a precarious kind of commitment, in which the degree of conviction is inversely proportional to correspondence with the facts. Exhibit A for this common characterisation of religious belief is the maxim of the third-century Christian writer Tertullian, who is credited with the saying ‘I believe because it is absurd.’ This paradoxical expression makes a routine appearance in philosophical evaluations of the rationality of religious belief, in contemporary polemics addressed to an imagined opposition...
