Three days before Christmas: a good time to share some random thoughts on the reason for the holiday – the man Jesus with the title “Christ.” Jesus the man lived nearly 2,000 years ago as a Jewish subject in the Roman Empire. After he died, his followers kept his memory alive in a myriad of […]
Valerie Abrahamsen
Index to the Second Year
Thank you as always for checking in with WisdomWordsPPF! Here is a guide to the past year of blog posts (note that some posts appear in several categories). If you want a guide to the first year (October 2015-October 2016), you can find it here. Posts on Social Justice, Politics and Our Peer Nations The […]
The Wheat and the Weeds: The Law of Cause and Effect and Christian Judgmentalism
Traditional Christian judgmentalism – the notion that only those who believe in Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior will go to heaven when they die – originates in part from the New (Christian) Testament lesson that was read in many churches on Sunday, July 23, 2017. The lesson is from the Gospel of Matthew, […]
How Archaeology Can Assist Early Christian Studies and Why it Matters
In recent years, scholars of the New (Christian) Testament of the Bible – comprised of documents composed between 50 and 150 of the Common Era (CE) – have begun using the tools and interpretations of archaeologists in our quest for the context in which the earliest Christians lived. Since the apostle Paul (a Jew, let […]
The Devil and Us: Lessons from the Paranormal Evidence
The devil, also referred to as Satan, is featured several times in the Great Litany of the Church, which is sometimes spoken or chanted during Lent. Are these references to Satan pertinent to us in our time? If so, in what way? Is the devil a real being with potential to do great harm or […]
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Wisdom on Death and the Afterlife
It is probably safe to say that many if not most of us are familiar with classic detective Sherlock Holmes. His creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), actually was ambivalent about his creation, and here we will honor that sentiment and focus on an element of Doyle’s life that was much closer to his heart: […]
Thecla, Paul and the Prehistoric Goddess
What do Chicago, Clinton Township, Michigan, and Pembroke, Massachusetts have in common? They are all home to churches named for St. Thecla. Who was Thecla? The story of Thecla is found in the apocryphal book, The Acts of Paul and Thecla, written in the late second century. Church leader Tertullian, writing about 200 in de […]
The Feminine/Androgynous Jesus
Jesus was a man, right? In the New (Christian) Testament of the Bible he certainly was. However, in the first few centuries of the Common Era (CE), images of Jesus were not limited to male. During this era, a great deal of Christian literature, generally called “apocryphal” or “extra-canonical,” circulated but did not make it […]
Animals go to Heaven
About a year ago, Pope Francis was purported to comfort a child on the death of his pet by saying that animals go to heaven. While the report may be apocryphal (and may or may not actually have been attributed to Pope Paul VI), the survival of animals’ souls after death is a persistent question, […]