Todd's Blog

As usual, we've launched our holiday fundraising campaign at Core Academy. This year we're seeking $40,000 to finish the budget, replenish the Sanders Scholarship Fund, and replace our DNA sequencer. We've already raised $6,570 of that goal, and we're very grateful for all the kind words and contributions. I'm also happy to announce that a generous donor has come forward to challenge us with a matching gift. Every dollar gift this week through midnight on Sunday, December 14, will be doubled, and that gift will help us claim the full matched amount if we raise another $5,000 this week. If you've enjoyed our work either here or on Let's Talk Creation  ( https://letstalkcreation.org ) or on my Patreon ( https://patreon.com/researchreports ) or at one of our live events or maybe you know a student who has directly benefited from our work, would you please consider a donation this holiday season? Thanks for reading, and may the Lord bless you this holiday season...

For those who don't follow our podcast  Let's Talk Creation , I wanted to let you know that the first episode of Paul and Todd's Czech Anthropology Adventure is now available. In that episode, my co-host Paul Garner and I have quite a conversation about the "veneration" of these fossils. We draw some very explicit parallels between the long lines and many foreign visitors coming to this exhibit and medieval people going on religious pilgrimages. Being in that room with the fossils, where the room was dark and the bones were in coffin-like exhibits, there was definitely a hush over the crowd, almost a reverence. (Then there were the noisy creationists yammering on about anatomical details.)  We had an interesting conversation about science vs religion and how modern museums have become our cathedrals. Check out the episode for more. In a fun little coincidence, Paige Madison has a piece in  Smithsonian  magazine on the exhibit, and she confirms that reverential a...

  I've been in or around Christian academia for 25 years now, and I have never attended the annual conference of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) until just last week. Why not? A mix of things. It's not my field. It's expensive. With travel days, it takes out a whole week. As someone entrusted with donor money for Core Academy, I have spent very, very little on conference travel for myself. This year a donor supplied the cost for attending the ETS meeting in Boston. "You have to go. It's important that creationists be there." Who can argue with that? Especially when I'm not footing the bill! So that's how I found myself on a very early flight to Boston last Monday morning. For those unfamiliar, ETS is the main organization for theologians and Bible scholars on sort of the conservative end of the theological spectrum. These would be folks who affirm the inerrancy of Scripture for example. The conference resembled other academic conferences I...

Paul Garner and I just got home from a week in Czechia where we did a little whirlwind tour of anthropology sites and museums.   We were very busy pretty much all the time, either viewing and touring places or recording video for our podcast Let’s Talk Creation (find it wherever you get your podcasts).   I’m happy to report that everything went mostly according to plan.   We recorded 100+ Gb of video, audio, and photos, with enough material for three full podcast episodes, which will take a couple months to edit and release, so look for those coming in January.   We also shot some shorts for the New Creation blog, and those will come out whenever the New Creation guys post them.   I don’t want to spoil everything from those videos, but I did want to give a little written update about our journey. Thanks especially to the Genesis Fund at the Nehemiah Foundation for sponsoring our trip.   They were very generous to go along with our little scheme on such s...