I recently read an excellent book, Fintan O’Toole’s, We Don’t Know Ourselves. It is a personal narrative of growing up in Ireland from the late ’50s to the present. It’s a wide-ranging book, covering politics, culture, social issues, economics, and religion, written with an engaging and compelling style. One of the recurring themes of the … More Truth, Fear, and the Church
As some of you know, I am gathering ideas for a book about teaching the Bible to undergraduates. At the moment I’m pondering the fact that serious study of the Bible seems to be a thing of the past and that today’s undergraduates, even those from Evangelical churches, have minimal knowledge of Scripture. Russell Moore, … More The Place of Jesus in the Evangelical Church of Trump
Factors Behind Biblical Illiteracy A serious student of scripture at work Last week I complained about the problem of teaching the Bible in a context where, increasingly, people are ignorant of the Bible. This week I’d like to talk about a related issue. One of my goals is to get students to see each biblical … More Why Bother with the Bible? Part 2
After a brief hiatus, I’ve returned to active writing on this site. For my first post-hiatus activity, I’m posting a short piece that I wrote for a recent book: My good friend Tom Oord (https://thomasjayoord.com/) edited this collection with Alexa Oord. It contains short essays by around 90 contributors, including me. It’s available at Amazon. … More A Religious Koan: What Is the Sound of No One Conversing?
So, I’m working on a book on reading the Bible, specifically on a chapter on the reader’s role in the phenomenon of meaning. (I’ve experienced a long interruption in the form of another book; I received a contract to write a small book on the Trinity and, as they say, a contract in the hand … More A Lesson from Soren Kierkegaard
August 22, 2016 What is music? And what can music tell us about the reader’s role in co-creating the Bible’s meaning? I took up classical guitar a few years ago. I had musical experience before I did so, but I never thought about music philosophically. But once I started playing guitar and, more important, performing, … More Music and Reading the Bible (The Reader’s Culture, Part 3)
August 16, 2016 Here’s a photo of a painting at the Phoenix Art Museum: Like all modern art, it invites thought. What is the connection between “oiled” and “dead”? Is it statement about the way in which a piece of art, once painted (“oiled”), becomes something fixed (“dead”)? If so, what at what point is … More Writing and death (Modern Art and the Bible 5)
August 15, 2016 Here are some thoughts about biblical interpretation as I try to get clear about the reader’s role in the phenomenon of meaning. The chapter that I am currently working on is about the way in which we create meaning as we read the Bible. This is because the Bible (like any text) … More The Reader’s Culture (part 2)
August 8, 2016 I’m working on a chapter that deals with the role of the reader in interpreting the Bible. In contemporary theory, the meaning of a text is not simply in the words, but in the ways in which readers construe those words. The words bear a potential meaning, but the meaning is not … More The Reader’s Culture
July 29, 2016 Phoenix’s Art Museum has a set of photographs (I forgot to note the artist’s name), showing tree roots and their effects on sidewalks. They provide a great illustration for all sorts of themes–the power of nature vs. human artifice, the ultimate destruction of all things human, even plate techtonics. This one … More Textual Surface and the Bible’s Underground (Modern Art and the Bible 4)
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