David M. Hodges ⁽¹⁸⁵⁾

Maoz, Baruch. Prophet on the Run: A Devotional Commentary on the Book of Jonah. Wapwallopen, PA: Shepherd Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1936908-844. If you're like me, you tend to avoid books labeled “devotional” because you've usually found that they lack gravitas, are comforting but not convicting, encouraging but not very instructive. Prophet on the Run is not that kind of book. Nontechnical, practical, and written in common language for “Mr. and Mrs. Anybody”…

No sooner had I recovered sufficiently from an illness to watch some news than I was greeted by a story highlighting once again the sorry state of our dieing culture. Members of the homosexual lobby (known in corrupt contemporary English as “gays”) apparently read GQ, since their (as always) loud and emotional condemnation of public statements unfriendly to their irrational and unbiblical worldview has gotten Phil Robertson, patriarch of the hugely popular…

About the Image: “The Wager” by David M. Hodges, created late 1990s, updated 2013. The version of this image I recovered recently from some old Zip disks dated to 11 September 1998. The late 1990s were the time when my skeptical agnosticism was consuming itself (as self-referentially incoherent thought systems always must if one refuses to stop analyzing and reflecting upon them; I once quipped during this time that, though Socrates had…

Re: abitwiser, “how the [expletive deleted] could Noah know with any” (posted 27 November 2013, accessed 28 November 2013), which rejects the Bible's flood narrative based on the belief that other persons than Noah should have been able to survive, since surely there must have been other people with boats. Although the remarks that follow are addressed to Craigslist (CL) user abitwiser (as “you”), I have posted them here rather than on…

I'm not sure how this happened with all the barbed wire, “No Trespassing” signs, and roaming attack dogs on the property, but Monday of this week a local Jehovah's Witness made it to my front door. (Actually, there were two, but I only interacted with one.) Since I would be leaving soon and still had tasks I needed to complete first, I couldn't manage a long conversation, so I let my visitor…

Earlier this week, an email from my local creation museum informed me that said museum had been refused membership in the area’s Museum Council. I’d spoken to employees and friends of the museum the day that some representatives of the Council had visited, so I knew those representatives had been favorably impressed and that museum employees and friends fully expected their Council application to be approved. Dour gloom-and-doomer that I am, my…

One seminary I attended, Bethel Seminary San Diego, hosted lectures this week by a C. S. Lewis scholar. Though I did not attend the lectures, notice of them did prompt in me some transitory interest in Lewis, or at least in one article strongly critical of him. Unlike many Christians I know (especially at Bethel, where I once heard a professor refer to Lewis as “our hero”), I have never been a…

Though only some remarks after “One final bit of irritation” are relevant to the Pious Eye site’s purpose, I’ve found no review site that will keep something of this length posted. Besides, Pious Eye is also my personal blog (at times, after a fashion), and this is a bit of my recent personal history. On the 5-star rating system standard to review sites, I give two stars to the Biomat Plasma Center…

A couple of my Facebook acquaintances seem to share most of what a certain Christian feminist/egalitarian (she self-identifies as both), Rachel Held Evans (hereafter, RHE), posts to her blog. (That's what I get for attending a seminary where ordination-seeking women are plentiful, I suppose.) Having finally taken the time to read one of these link-shares, I decided to post some comments. In what follows, I will analyze aspects of one of RHE's…

Christians active in the battle against pornography have lately been excited by news of a not-yet-peer-reviewed Cambridge study popularly reported to prove that “porn addiction” is as real as addiction to drugs or alcohol. When I first heard about this (in an email from Breakpoint), I was skeptical, since I recalled (or thought I recalled!) from a couple Physiological Psychology courses that alcohol and drugs don't just prompt certain patterns of brain…

In my recent review of Randy Guliuzza’s “Creation Apologetics” presentation, I at one point made reference to “medicine and engineering, two fields in which Guliuzza (you’ll recall) has credentialed expertise.” As I reflect on this statement, it occurs to me that some comment on the value of “credentialed expertise” might be in order. Elitists among us like to treat all persons recognized as experts as entitled to have all their arguments accepted…

Yesterday (Saturday 28 September 2013), the creation museum in my area held its yearly “Museum Day.” Though the event ran from 9 AM to 6 PM, with presentations by a range of speakers from Gary Parker to John Morris to Ray Comfort, I only managed to attend a single presentation: Randy Guliuzza's “Creation Apologetics.” Dr. Guliuzza is both a Medical Doctor (M.D.) and an Engineer (P.E.), and the title “Creation Apologetics” falls…