From kottke.org: Searching for Jesus:

From a recent issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik surveys a recent selection of books about who Jesus was.

The American scholar Bart Ehrman has been explaining the scholars’ truths for more than a decade now, in a series of sincere, quiet, and successful books. Ehrman is one of those best-selling authors like Richard Dawkins and Robert Ludlum and Peter Mayle, who write the same book over and over — but the basic template is so good that the new version is always worth reading. In his latest installment, ‘Jesus, Interrupted’, Ehrman once again shares with his readers the not entirely good news he found a quarter century ago when, after a fundamentalist youth, he went to graduate school: that all the Gospels were written decades after Jesus’ death; that all were written in Greek, which Jesus and the apostles didn’t speak and couldn’t write (if they could read and write at all); and that they were written as testaments of faith, not chronicles of biography, shaped to fit a prophecy rather than report a profile.

Shame about those, you know, facts.

I have a confession to make. I own a Kenny G CD. I bought it with my own money.

There were, however, a couple of mitigating factors at play that you should know about. I was 15. I’d never heard of him. I listened to about 20 seconds of each track in the shop, and it sounded ok, so I bought it. (When I got it home I realised that it’s exactly the same as those 20 seconds, repeated over and over and over and ….) It’s at the very bottom of my CD collection, having been played through once only.

But I do own the CD. And as a sax player, I cringe each and every time I hear someone speaking approvingly of him.

Which is why this essay by Pat Metheney on the musical and cultural value—or lack thereof—of Kenny G’s music is so awesome:

By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture – something that we all should be totally embarrassed about – and afraid of.

(h/t kottke)

[h/t bathgate]

Whenever I’m tempted to grumble about safe ministry training and child protection legislation I’ll remember this story.

(Note: extraordinarily and graphically awful, not least because of the church’s siding with the powerful and charismatic over the weak. Powerful and disturbing reading.)

This is one of those articles I wish I’d written, since it’s entirely and precisely about me.

This article is worth it if only for one line:

Steep is the descent into orthographic antinomianism.

But there’s other gold there too. Programmers, especially: go read it.