Dr Paul Allen

David and Bathsheba by Jan Matsys, 1562, Louvre (Photo credit: Wikipedia )  For example, in 2 Samuel 11:3, David looks from his window and sees a beautiful woman bathing in an adjacent house. He inquires of her name, and finds out: “Is this not Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam ?” And from there it becomes your typical king-meets-wife-of-deployed-soldier, affair-pregnancy-murder-cover-up kind of story, and ends up costing David his kingdom. But this story can become confusing when you read in 1 Chronicles 3:5 that David had four children “by Bath-shua , the daughter of Ammiel .” So what gives? Why is Bathsheba’s name spelled differently, and was her father named Ammiel or Eliam? This question is not just simply an issue of missing the forest for the trees—although if you ask this question, please don’t neglect the larger issues of what God wants you to learn from David’s sin and how that ended up dividing the kingdom. But if you spend any time reading Samuel, Kings, and Chron...

English: Resurrection of Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) In 2005 a Russian man made the news with his claims of being able to bring dead people back to life. This was no Miracle Max resuscitation of the “mostly dead” nor a psychic sixth sense of channeling revenant spirits. His claims were audaciously clear: he could bring your deceased loved ones back to life, body and soul—for a price. The fee of such sought-after services would limit his clientele to a select few who possessed an unfortunate composite of wealth, desperation, and gullibility. One grieving widow paid 118,000 rubles (about $40,000 at the time) for Grabavoy to resurrect her two deceased boys. A cheaper package is the “prevention is better than cure” option, for which one man shelled out 40,000 rubles to heal his dying parents. In an unprecedented callousness this self-proclaimed necromancer marketed his services to the distraught parents of the 300 children who died in the Beslan school terrorist siege of 2004. ...

As a social experiment it could hardly have been devised better. Put 33 men 2300 feet underground and seal them in with limited supplies and with no guarantee that they will be rescued. Then leave them there for 69 days. What would happen? Would they divide into packs and begin to destroy one another a la  Lord of the Flies ? Would they resort to cannibalism? Would they resort to homosexuality?  These are the questions people were asking when just such an accident happened at the San Jose copper-gold mine in the Atacama Desert near Copiapo, Chile . 33 men were trapped when a slab of rock the size of a skyscraper came between them and the outside world . And all the world watched to see if they could be saved from their tomb. The last man was rescued from that mine on the 13th of October, 2010. On February 14, 2011  33 Men  hit store shelves, a book detailing the disaster and response. 4 months. That hardly seems like enough time to write a book, not to ...