Ponder Anew!

There are many David Larsons in this world and even some David R. Larsons!  I am the only one who is Emeritus Professor of Religion at Loma Linda University.  Yes, my deceased parents were Ralph S. Larson and Jeanne Marjorie Riederer Larson. With this website, I start all over again.  I was with Typepad for many years but it went out of business.  I will gradually repost at this website some of things that I had posted at my previous one. There is a Search Box at the upper right hand corne the banner.  At the upper left hand corner, there are three small lines.  Clicking them takes one to the Archives and to the Labels clusters of posts that are similar in content.  For instance, there is a label for "Religion and Science."  There is only one post in this cluster but there will be more.  Also, at the bottom of each post there is an opportunity to make comments.  As evidenced by the fact that this is a .com website, I believe that I was t...

There now are three primary and overlapping schools of theological thought each of which has several versions, among Seventh-day Adventist in the local congregations of North America. All of them blame the delay of the second coming of Jesus on human failure. Although they differ in what they say this human failure is, they all say that it is the culprit. Last Generation Theology. Those in this group say that the Second Coming of Jesus has been delayed because not enough of us are perfectly reproducing the character of Christ. They are confident. They believe that there is only one true version of the Gospel and they know what it is. All others are counterfeits. They sometimes divide families, congregations, campuses by insisting that everybody must agree with them. They are theological exclusivists. They are swift to call other views "heresy" and those who hold them "heretics." They think in either/or terms. Either we are members of their group and see th...

More than  seven thousand religion scholars of all faiths and no faith at all convene each year at some city in the United States the weekend before the nation's Thanksgiving holiday for the joint annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL).  They begin at noon on Saturday and continue through noon on Tuesday. The meetings of the AAR and SBL are usually integrated.They meet in the same hotels and convention centers.  Scholars may belong to either society or both.  They have the same schedules.  They print the sequence of their hundreds of sessions in the same thick 81/2 x 11 catalogue that also features many advertisements for new books and other things. When the catalogue is open, the times and places of the AAR sessions are often presented on the left page and those of the SBL are often presented on the right page.  Both societies host large plenary sessions in the evenings.  Even if they the...

A Presentation by David R. Larson at the  November 2004 meetings of the American Academy of Religion  meetings in San Antonio, Texas “There is in God both supreme  necessity and supreme contingency.”  Karl Barth  God’s “conceptuality at once exemplifies  and establishes the categoreal conditions.”  Alfred North Whitehead  “God’s sociality cannot be satisfied by God’s self;   God’s love requires an object that is not God, namely, a world.”  Donna Bowman  Although they agree that God loves the universe, process theology and openness of God  theology typically differ in their understanding of this relationship. Process theology  usually holds that it is necessary and essential. Openness-of-God theology often  contends that it is neither. This difference is related to process theology’s usual  rejection of the idea that God creates the universe out of nothing, a theme that  openness of God theolog...

What are the rules by which specialists in natural sciences such as physics, chemistry and biology properly distinguish truth from error? What procedural guidelines appropriately govern the work of specialists in social sciences such as psychology, sociology and anthropology? Do specialists in philosophy and theology have trustworthy rules for their work too? If not, why not? If so, in what ways are these norms similar to, and in what ways are they different from, the canons that we rightly expect natural and social scientists to follow? Because it responds to these questions with comprehensiveness, precision and clarity, and because it is one of the first publications by a younger theologian whose influence is growing, this book is worth studying today even though it was first published more than a dozen years ago.  Philip Clayton, who was born in 1956, earned degrees from Westmont College and Fuller Theological Seminary before studying the history of philosophy and theology for t...

David R. Larson presented this at the September 1, 2007 Memorial Service in Loma Linda, California for Ralph S. Larson (1920-2007). Our father was born on November 14, 1920 near Salem, Oregon. He was the eighth child in a family that would include five sons and four daughters, once his younger sister Doris was born. Of the nine children in his family of origin, she is the only one who still lives and we are delighted that she and her husband are with us today from Maryland. His mother’s family, which was of Irish and Scottish descent, traversed the Great Plains in the wagon trains of the nineteenth century. His father was an undocumented immigrant from Sweden. The men in his family worked in the forests, lumber mills, dairies and businesses of the Pacific Northwest. He might have lived a similar life had he not become a Seventh-day Adventist through the evangelistic campaigns and radio broadcasts of Elders Dan and Melvin Venden, the “true” Venden brothers who are respectively the uncle...