What has the pandemic affected in your life? If your life is like most, the answer is “everything.” Walter Bruegemann writes about the Psalms as being songs of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation. The pandemic has tossed us into a period of disorientation. It is a time of lamentation, of asking…
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Moving from Mush
Dr. Amanda Mbuvi, a professor at High Point University, is my interviewee this week (to be posted on Thursday). She shares insights from the classroom as well as from her book, Belonging in Genesis: Biblical Israel and the Politics of Identity Formation (Baylor University Press). Here is one illustration about…
Hide Your Bibles if He is Elected!
According to a currrent article in The Atlantic, “if Jefferson became president, thundered a Federalist opponent in 1798, ‘the Bible would be cast into a bonfire, our holy worship changed into a dance of Jacobin phrensy, our wives and daughters dishonored, and our sons converted into the disciples of Voltaire…
Recent Video Interviews You May Have Missed
It happens every Thursday… Every Thursday, I release a new interview with a scholar, an author, or a practitioner. We talk about the Bible, interpretation of the Bible, or spiritual formation. I do this in the hope that those of us who are good Bible teachers will come closer to…
Why are there four gospels?
The four gospels that we have (the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) tell the story of Jesus and of his first followers. Each of them has a unique approach and a unique audience, as described in this video clip of an interview I did with Paul Borgman: 1…
Where are the original documents of the Bible?
If we had the original documents of the Bible, where would they be? Why don’t we have them? Could they eventually surface one day? Many years ago, I had the rare opportunity to be in an hour-long small-group Q&A with Dallas Willard. Dallas was regarded as a mentor to many…
Why I Interview
I remember that day in seminary like it was yesterday. I asked the professor a question that had been bugging me for years. We were talking about the source theory for the four gospels. This theory assumes that Mark was the first gospel written. It was the primary source for…
Silence in the Teacher’s Toolbox
On Thursday, I will upload the video of my interview with Garret Mostowski, a pastor in Detroit. When I interviewed him, he was a student at Princeton Divinity School, leading a weekly “holy reading” group at Trinity Episcopal Church in Princeton. Holy reading (aka lectio divina) involves listening to the…
Teach the Bible Like Stephen King? Horrors!
I’ve come to the place in my reading and studying the Bible that a fresh angle is refreshing. I know the traditional interpretations, the safe and comfortable writers, the orthodox perspectives, the insights from people like me – white, middle-class, educated, men. These days, I long for a different angle….
Finding God in the Faith of Outsiders
I have just completed reading Barbara Brown Taylor’s memoir as a teacher of world religions, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. It was a great read – insightful, profound, and humorous. Barbara’s “holy envy” comes as she recognizes in others’ religions things that are missing in her…
