Next fall, we’re reworking the Level One introduction to the Bible. We’ve rejiggered our undergraduate programme to begin by familiarising students with the Bible itself, and to prepare them for critical reading by helping them observe differences between what you might call “the cultural story of the Bible” (on one hand) and what one reads…
All posts in May 2011
Mountain Goats In Glasgow
Sunday night I’ll be going to King Tut’s Wah-Wah Hut (no, I’m not kidding, Radiohead and Oasis were “discovered” there, among other bands) to see the Mountain Goats touring behind their new album, All Eternals Deck. I’m an ardent Goats fan, and I probably mentioned here several times that I wrote an article about them…
What An Impending Avalanche Might Feel Like
I don’t have time to comment fully on this — if you’ve been paying attention, you can guess the things I usually say — but take a look at the latest development from Seth Godin’s ‘The Domino Project’. Right on so many levels: a public-domain text, cleaned up and dressed nicely for digital distribution,…
Cranmer’s Prologue to the Great Bible
For the whole cornucopia of reasons that you can readily enough recite — academic, Anglican, biblical scholar, theoretician, typographer, preacher, reader of Henrician/Elizabethan literature, partisan of the non-verbal elements of communication — I have long been fascinated with Thomas Cranmer’s writings on biblical interpretation. One favourite of mine, his Prologue to the Great Bible, has…
On Knowing Greek and Hebrew
”Do I understand Greek and Hebrew? Otherwise, how can I undertake, as every Minister does, not only to explain books which are written therein but to defend them against all opponents? Am I not at the mercy of everyone who does understand, or even pretends to understand, the original? For which way can I confute…
Happy, Uh, Everything! To Everyone!
So, before I say anything else, I want to wish a very, very happy (USA) Mother’s Day to my mom Nancy, and to Margaret’s mom Pat, to my grandmothers Isabelle, Lois, and Del, and to Margaret’s grandmothers Ruth and Dorothy. And to Margaret — hi, honey! And without prejudice also to anyone for whom Mother’s…
Kinesthetic Preaching
(You will not be surprised to note that I am simultaneously working on tomorrow’s sermon and listening to my iTunes DJ playlist.) People frequently comment on the physicality of my sermons, the extent to which I preach with my full body. That comes in great part from having been taught to preach by the…
Striking Sparks
I’m not surprised to hear about a study at the University of Washington that gives the Kindle (the large-size DX model) middling marks as an educational tool. We have a smaller Kindle and like it a lot for casual reading. The screen is extremely readable, the battery lasts for ages without recharging, and as long…
Justice, Vengeance, Terror, Execution
Other people will have said more than enough about the US’s execution of Osama bin Laden. Amid all the exultation and deprecation, there are a number of points we ought to bear in mind. First, bin Laden’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have successfully pushed once-open Western democracies into a…
Bible and Critical Theory Open Access
I missed it when Roland Boers made the announcement, but he has taken Bible and Critical Theory (on whose editorial board my estimable colleagues Ward Blanton and Yvonne Sherwood serve) to an Open Access distribution model. That’s great news on a number of fronts. Of course, it makes B&CT easier to read and cite…