Ronald V. Huggins

I had occasion to pull together the early lists in Greek and Latin of the eight and then seven deadly sins in Evagrius, John Cassian, and Gregory the Great for a footnote in something I'm writing. So just in case anyone would like to have them, here they are: Evagrius of Pontus (c. 345-399) Evagrius’s list runs as follows:  (1) Gluttony (γαστριμαργία / gula),  (2) Fornication (πορνεία / luxuria),  (3) Avarice (φιλαργυρία / avaritia),  (4) Anger (ὀργή / iracundia),  (5) Sadness [=dejection] (λύπη/ tristitia),  (6) Acedia [=sloth] (ἀκηδία / akēdia),  (7) Vainglory (κενοδοχια / vana gloria),  (8) Pride (ὑπερηφανία / superbia).  De octo spiritibus malitiae  1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17. Conveniently in English in  Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus  (trans., intro, comm., Robert E. Sinkewicz; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 66-69. Evagrius follows basically the same orde...

I came upon the following example of Christopher Hitchens plagiarism in his National Book Award finalist volume, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007).  Hitchens gives himself away by copying the misspelled names of several gods from his plagiarized source (discussion follows the comparative chart).   This example of Hitchens’s plagiarism came to my attention when I was trying to make sense of his referring to the mother of the Hindu deity Krishna as “Devaka” rather than of “Devaki,” the latter being correct.  (Traditionally Devaka was Krishna's maternal grandfather, not his mother). The source Hitchens plagiarized was the obscure 1930s work Essays on Freethinking by the atheist writer Chapman Cohen (1868-1954). What Hitchens did was simply copy what Cohen had written without acknowledgement and without an adequate grasp of its subject matter.  The result was that Hitchens copied over even Cohen’s misspellings of the names of t...

Wittoba / Vithoba Common Assertions: (1) Wittoba (2) of the Telingonese was (3) crucified (4) in 552 B.C.  These assertions come mainly from Kersey Graves’s, The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (1876), and have been mindlessly copied by a great host of Graves plagiarizers ever since. The Facts: (1) Wittoba.   One of the difficulties in seeing the problem with Graves’s assertions about Wittoba is that nobody spells that deity’s name that way anymore (except, of course, Graves’s plagiarizers 1 ).  Modern writers with real knowledge of this deity most often spell it Vithoba, Vitthal, or Vitthalla. Only those with no independent knowledge of this deity still spell the name Wittoba. An experiment  that dramatically demonstrates this visually is to do a Google Image search first for “Wittoba” a nd then for “Vithoba.”  (2) of the Telingonese . Graves spells this two ways, Bilingonese and Telingonese. 2 ...

Money, Sex, and Power  The three great motivators Ever noticed how prone people captured by a combination of any two of these hankerings to rage with self-righteous contempt against those captured by whatever the third hankering happens to be. Why's that I wonder?

On March 10, 2017, former President Obama's half brother tweeted a copy of what purports to be President Obama's Kenyan birth certificate.  This is the same birth certificate that Lucas Smith was making available in 2009 (see here ), but beyond that, and what I want to show here, is that it is a copy of the copy that Lucas Smith had.  This is seen by comparing the additional stamping in the upper left hand corner.  Look first at Smith's copy:  Now look at the same part of the page in the copy Malik Obama made available.   Malik's copy comes from Smith's Feb 19, 2009 copy.   What this means is that Malik Obama's copy was made from Lucas Smith's copy.  In other words it is not a separate copy of the document originating with the Obama family.  If it were that it would have been highly significant because it would have proven that Lucas Smith's copy was not, as was widely argued, a forgery. There is by the way a...

Russell Moore If the intent of investigating ECRL leader Russell Moore is (as I hope) to work for peace and unity in the SBC, then good (though the use of the term "investigate" may be rather poorly chosen). If the intend is really to unseat Moore for opposing Trump, then that's bad. I think it is important to oppose such an action for a number of reasons. First, the candidacy of Donald Trump was a problematic one that a number of prominent Christian leaders struggled with. One may think for example, of John Piper's article "How to Live Under and Unqualified President." And then there was Wayne Grudem's disorienting on--again, off-again, endorsement of Trump, and this, remember, was the same Wayne Grudem who had published in 2010 the magisterial work, Politics According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture. Trump's candidacy threw even Grudem a curve ball. Secon...

The singular "they" has become quite broadly accepted in many fields as a way of avoiding repetition of they, (for "he" or "she,") and "them" for "him or her"). You can replace the masculine first person singular with something like "(s)he," but you run into a wall when you get to him/her or his/her and so are still pushed back toward the singular "they, "them, "their" and so on.    There actually was a reason for the use of the collective masculine (present in many languages) other than the desire to promote patriarchy, it actually facilitated compactness of style. You can achieve the same thing now by using "she" and "her" instead of "he" and "him". That is certainly good and valid, so long as you keep two things in mind, one the latter of which second of which flows form the former. In the first place in doing so you aren't really communicating a true g...