1. In Golden Bells and Pomegranates, Burton Visotzky refers to Semiramis, the wife of Nebuchadnezzar in Jewish rabbinic literature.
I thought she was the wife of Nimrod a millennium earlier! Wasn’t she the one who started paganism? Well, there are different traditions about who Semiramis was and when she lived—from Jewish, Christian, and other sources. See the following documented wikipedia articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiramis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninus
2. Evangelical theologian Clark Pinnock has passed away. I’m not sure when I first heard of him, but it was probably when I was shelving books at the Harvard Divinity School library. Pinnock was an annihilationist, an inclusivist, and an open theist. Cool guy! To read my write-ups on Pinnock’s essay regarding inclusivism, see:
More on Religious Pluralism: Clark Pinnock
Some Loose Ends on Religious Pluralism
3. It’s not often that somebody I know dies. (I’m not talking about Pinnock, here.) You see a person every now and then, and you’re used to his presence, whether you’re close to him or not. Then, he unexpectedly dies, and you won’t see him again (at least not on this side of death).