Learning religion online: 7-15-11

I was reading through my latest issue of the BottomLine/Personal publication the other day and ran across something I should have known about, and am surprised I didn't.

You can find free college courses online from the likes of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and others. Now, you won't get college credit by sitting at your computer watching a lecture, but, still, you can learn a lot just by clicking in. I'm going to give you this link to the article in the July 15 edition, though it says it's not yet available on the Web, but perhaps if you check back later it might be.

Two of the classes mentioned especially interested me and may interest you.

* "Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible)", taught by Yale University religious studies Professor Christine Hayes. To check it out, click here. You will find here 24 lectures for just under an hour each. And if you set the video to run full screen, it's quite clear and engaging.

* On YouTube, you can find lectures in a UCLA class called "Science, Magic and Religion," taught by Professor Courtenay Raia. For those, click here. The page to which I've linked you will contain a bunch of lectures, but I intuitively started at the upper left-hand corner and it turned out to be the opening one. I could tell because she was first talking about not worrying if you, as a student, were on the waiting list for this course.

The BottomLine piece said there were Stanford courses on iTunes, and I found this pdf describing that work.

Well, you can hunt around and see what other faith-based courses you might find for little or no money. Let me know what you turn up. Just don't give me any pop quizzes on what you're learning.

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MOCKING IT UP AS THEY GO ALONG

A man in Austria has been granted the right to wear a colander on his head in his driver's license photo because he claims it's religious headgear required by his faith -- pastafarianism. And we can't wait to see what a person might wear who claims to be a pantheist.