Help Me Believe
Chapter nine of the Gospel of Mark speaks of a father who brought his son to Jesus to be healed. The man makes one of the most honest statements in the whole Bible. Jesus tells this man that “Anything is possible if a person believes.” The father of the boy says, “I do believe,…
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Aedes aegypti mosquito
Photo credit: Alex Wild[1] (Click on the photo to get a larger image.) This terrifying picture shows an Aedes aegypti mosquito rising out of the water immediately after it has metamorphosed from its larval stage. Without a sense of scale this creature looks like some dragon from a Peter Jackson film. Despite the fact that it…
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Sympathy For the Dead
In his time, Johnny Cash sang more than one murder ballad. Adam Cohen, Kenny Rogers, Crooked Still, Sting, and Tom Waits also recorded songs in this genre. Even the consummate pop songwriter Barry Manilow wrote a song about murder (perhaps one day I will expand on these other murder-ballads). What is it about murder…
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Denisovan DNA
A recent article in the journal Science[1] gives further confirmation of the mixed heritage of the human species. Researchers compared the DNA of 35 Melanesians from the Bismarck Archipelago in Papua New Guinea to the DNA of ancient Denisovan DNA from a 40,000-year-old partially fossilized sample. They also compared DNA from other non-Melanesian populations and…
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Hearing from God
Hearing from God is both an individual and a communal practice. Gordon Smith, in his book The Voice of Jesus, makes it clear that there is danger in relying too much on ourselves or too much on the community of faith. “The community, then, while it is essential to our individual identity, is also a…
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