Gods be praised - peer review is workling again! Some will recall that when Dr Richard Carrier (who has a Phd from Columbia) had his most recent book rejected by peer review, he made the remarkable announcement that peer review in NT Studies and related fields was broken and ...

A little hurt I wasn’t invited

Very happy to receive my copy of @Matthijsdendulk Ethnic Stereotypes and the Letters of Paul this morning! Hartelijk dank!

An antidote to the moral masochism that’s become rampant in the psychotherapy professions: “I reread the story of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke. The parable, well known, concerns a man set upon by thieves and left for dead: [The Samaritan] bound up his wounds... and set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn and took care of him. And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two coins and gave then to the innkeeper and said unto him, ‘Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more,’ when I come again, I will repay thee.’ ‘Take care of him,’ says the Samaritan. He delegates the caretaking of the victim to another! The story of the Good Samaritan is not, as I had vaguely recalled, one of selfless endless availability ‘like the 24-hour store.’ The biblical passage suggests the ethical possibility, even the ethical necessity of doing a finite amount, engaging others to help, and then moving on... [It] points to a balance between concern for self and a concern for others—a lesson for all times.” —Deborah Luepnitz, Schopenhauer’s Porcupines

They removed CD/DVD drives from devices. They made physical media harder to buy and use. They removed expandable storage from phones. They pushed us into streaming subscriptions. They made always-online normal. They made unlimited internet necessary. Then slowly raised the price of everything. Ownership quietly became renting.