The End(s) of Monotheism W/ David Burnett

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Dan McClellan (0:36)

There's some ambiguity there. Is Paul saying, oh yeah, these things that people call gods, but we know there's only one God. Is Paul saying that?

Or is Paul saying, yeah, there are these gods all over the place, but as far as we're concerned, only one God matters to us.

David Burnett (0:52)

That is what he's saying.

Dan McClellan (0:58)

Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (0:59)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:01)

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma Podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher (1:13)

Things are going great. I'm having a good time. I did not get to travel this last weekend, however, and apparently you guys did. And I'm saying you guys, because there's not just you here with us.

Why don't you tell the people who we got here?

Dan McClellan (1:30)

So we got the People's Champ. My old friend, David Burnett, is joining us again.

Welcome to the show, David. I think it's our first time repeat guest. Is that accurate, Dan?

Dan Beecher (1:42)

Yeah, a returning champion.

Dan McClellan (1:43)

A returning, yes.

So welcome to the show. Good to have you back. Thank you for your time.

David Burnett (1:49)

Thank you. Thank you. Good to be back.

Dan McClellan (1:52)

And the reason-

David Burnett (1:53)

Glad to be the, oh, I was just saying, I'm glad to be the first returner.

Dan McClellan (1:58)

And we're glad to have you back, and hopefully there will be more returners in the future.

We are having you here because you and I just spent the first three days of the week hanging out together in lovely Providence, Rhode Island at Brown University. We were participating in a conference that we presented at as well as organized. That's correct. Yeah, and the weather was surprisingly, according to everybody who lived there, the weather was uncharacteristically nice, which was great.

David Burnett (2:32)

Yeah, it was really nice. Providence is beautiful.

Dan Beecher (2:35)

That was divine Providence is what that was. You guys were given the green light from above to get to do this conference.

Dan McClellan (2:47)

Well, I think that has to be where they got their name from, right? That enlightenment era notion of Providence.

Now, I think we've mentioned the conference before. In fact, I think David, the last time you were here, we talked about this. The conference is called The Meanings and Ends of Monotheism. And we had said we were gonna live stream it. It turned out that that wasn't gonna work for everybody. But we did record it, and it will be released publicly later.

But we wanted to have you on the show so we could just jam a little bit about the conference.

Dan Beecher (3:24)

We're gonna scoop the recording.

We're gonna get out in front of it and tell the people some of the cool stuff that you guys were able to talk about and that your guests were able to talk about. So I think that that's... I'm excited to hear about it. I was gonna watch it streaming, and then it turns out that that wasn't an option for me.

David Burnett (3:47)

Well, yeah. I mean, in discussions and planning the conference, this has been a long time of planning ahead of time to work out the details. And for a conference like this, it very much was a scholarly workshop style conference. So what we wanted from the conference and the sort of aims and goals of the conference, I think we accomplished better doing it this way, which is, you know, this is something that scholars need to workshop these ideas and work together on and get good feedback on and discussion going and work out those ideas. And then we take our papers back and there's gonna be like a six month process before we get papers back in for them to like make any edits they need to and all of that. And then we're going to share them with the actual conference members so that we can actually get feedback on each other's work. And then this is going to become a published volume.