Aaron Rathburn's Page

Here is a recent post of mine, hosted at the collaborative blog, "Dust and Light."

Mark Twain made famous the old quip, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The point of the idiom is that even such supposedly “brute facts” as statistics can be interpreted to have multiple meanings.

Numbers Don’t Lie: Historiography and Modernity

Many people bemoan the study of history. After all, h… Continue

Cosmologies

This is an illustration called the Flammarion Woodcut, depicting the ancient understanding of the world. A traveler has reached the end of the (flat) earth, and peers through the sky to see the heavenly dimensional plane beyond.

Living in our… Continue

This is a post from the blog that I co-author, "Dust and Light."

If you have not read my very brief “Primer on the Enlightenment,” I would recommend reading it as a starting point to this post.

†

Is God capable of using human mistakes for his divine purposes… Continue

Here is a post from my blog, "Theology & Culture."

Here is Martin Luther King Jr.’s prediction on the recently discussed collapse of evangelicalism.

He wrote this to his fellow clergymen in 1963, taken from his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.” He was speaking in the context of the civil rights movement, trying to wake the slumber of the Christian church that simply accepted the status quo.

But how much do his words apply to our… Continue

Here is a recent post at the blog "Dust and Light."

“An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump”

Joseph Wright of Derby, 1768

What exactly is going on in this painting?

An ecclectic group of people is g… Continue