1. On the Incarnation: Four Chalcedonian Sonnets
2. 13. The Serpent Bites the Dust; 14. Glory in the Highest; 15. The Woman’s Desire; 16. The Painful Good
3. Pope Eugen I, Francis on Islam
4. Homosexuality and the Resurrection of Disability
5. Why “Fourteen Generations” in the Genealogy of Matthew 1?
8. Divine Simplicity Sure Ain’t Simple
10. O’Donovan, Historicism, and Nature; Historicism and Liberalism; Historicism and Marriage
11. Bauckham on Paul’s Christology of Divine Identity
12. The Genuine Conflict Being Ignored in the Duck Dynasty Debate
13. At the Foot of the Cross with Thomas Hirschhorn
14. The Gift Half Understood: Tolkien and the Riddle of Christmas
15. It’s the Gospel Truth—So Take It or Leave It
16. The People Who Challenged My Atheism Most Were Drug Addicts and Prostitutes
18. The Friendly Beasts—A Brief History of a Delightful Carol
19. The Puritan War on Christmas
21. A Qualified Defence of Therapeutic Christianity
23. GLAAD Tidings, But Not of Comfort and Joy
24. Spain Approves New Restrictive Abortion Law
25. Vicars Defrocked
26. Right-Wing Group Seeks Help Rewriting the Bible Because It’s Not Conservative Enough
28. There is no “True” Prevalence of ADHD
30. Why Marketers Fear the Female Geek
31. Peak Civilization: The Fall of the Roman Empire
32. Generous Work/Family Policies Don’t Guarantee Equality
33. The Writing Prompts Subreddit – For those wanting an idea to spark their next novel.
34. The 15 Best Behavioural Science Graphs of 2010-13
35. 18 Dazzling Photos from National Geographic’s History
36. Watch Youtube in Slow Motion
37. 10 Truly Bizarre Victorian Deaths
41. What is it Like Watching Your Spouse Grow Older?
42. ‘Man Flu’: The Truth Women Don’t Want to Hear
43. Dandong: North Korea’s Most Surprising Border
44. Archaeology vs. Physics: Conflicting Roles for Old Lead
45. Why Are People Changing Their Minds About Same-Sex Marriage?
46. Possessive Individualism: Can We Really Own Ourselves?
47. How You’ll, Youse, and You Guys Talk – A quiz to place you on the dialect map.
48. Conservative Groups Spend Over $1bn a Year to Fight Action on Climate Change
50. 2013: A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year for the Tech Industry
51. Stanford Researchers: It Is Trivially Easy to Match Metadata to Real People
52. Religion as a Product of Psychotropic Drug Use
54. 5 Reasons Why a ‘Faithful Film Adaptation’ of the Hobbit would Stink
55. Crane Operator Takes Incredible Photos of Shanghai
56. Celebrating Christmas and the Holidays, Then and Now
57. 12 Maps of America From Before We Knew What It Looked Like
58. The 15 Best-Selling Toys in History
60. Why are the Virgin Birth, Empty Tomb, and Resurrection Controversial?
61. Into the Atmosphere
62. Horus Ruins Christmas
63. This Video Will Hurt
Alastair's Adversaria 
Peter Berger – Rumor of Angels
OK. I don’t really have much to say on this.
Oliver O’Donovan – A Conversation Waiting to Begin.
The first bit contained a fair bit of throat clearing, but the book picks up steam towards the end. Some useful things were said about how we related to scripture, though there was a bit of pedantry in there too. Matthew Anderson said something about it being really challenging for people on the conservative end of things, but I didn’t really pick any of that up. And the idea that we need a conversation doesn’t really strike me as likely to lead to much. The two sides are starting from vastly different premises and their different conclusions follow pretty straightforwardly from their premises. It’s a kind of shadow game.
Harold Bloom – The American Religion (A reread)
His notion of religion is wrong: it’s not based on fear of death. It’s also unclear what exactly he means by gnosticism. Modern religions don’t despise material reality, and in particular Mormon spirituality seems very materialistic. There may gnostic currents here and there in Joseph Smith’s thought (he seems to have been rather confused at times), but the main Mormon themes of making yourself into a (material) god though hard work, procreation, and organization don’t seem to me very gnostic at all. Mormonism seems all too comfortable in this cosmos. The chapters on Southern Baptist are quite illuminating, though, again, everything has to be shoehorned into a rather ill defined notion of gnosticism. The experiential religion of the Southern Baptists, were everything is reduced to the experience of Jesus, doesn’t seem to me very Christian at all. Though I have many reservations about the fundamentalist turn of the Southern Baptist Convention, much of what has happened there was simply a reassertion of historic Christian orthodoxy, in however crude a form. Finally, though many versions of American religion have overemphasized religious experience way way too much, we shouldn’t forget that religious experience, or at least some sort of spiritual intuition, is one of the crucial foundations of all religion, including Christianity.
It’s interesting that in the 25 years since this book was published, most of the distinctively experiential religion in America has been swept away by what Christian Smith called Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Formerly ecstatic religion has been reduced to a sort of lowest common denominator sludge. Increasingly the only really religious people left in America seem to be regular orthodox Protestants, Mormons and Catholic immigrants of varying degrees of orthodoxy.
Anyway, the book is very worthwhile, but a little crazy.