For diehard Tolkien fans like me, it was a no brainer that I would buy and read the Silmarillion many years ago, as a labor of love of Christopher Tolkien sifting through the many unpublished stories and manuscripts of his father. We owe Christopher a considerable debt because his father was, to be blunt, a tinkerer. He would create multiple versions of the same story, and in the case of the stories in the handsome 3 volume set called The... Read more

In days of sadness, In days of loss, We share our problems, But at what cost? With social distance Alone, together We try resistance To viral weather. And yet by breathing Instead of living We spread contagion So unforgiving. It fells the old ones, It fells the young It fells the strong ones And it’s not done. A curse has fallen On all the land Without a cure It’s out of hand. What Fiend beguiles us What anger riles us... Read more

Long before he was a Chronicler of Narnia or wrote his Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis was a poet, and though his original early pre-Christian poems have been published and reprinted various times before, there is now a new edition, beautifully done, with a fresh Introduction by Karen Swallow Prior. This comes courtesy of the ambitious folks at Lexham Press who are doing some really interesting things. This work was originally published in 1919 under the name Clive Hamilton (the last... Read more

Steven Wright is one of the most original comedians of the modern era. He’s from Cambridge Massachusetts, which in itself breeds all sorts of offbeat and eccentric folk, not to mention geniuses at Harvard. I should know I spent time there at Harvard Div school. Here is a sample of his wit. It does not include some of my favorites when he deals with non sequiturs like ‘why do we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway’!!! Good... Read more

BEN: One of the salient points you make early on in your new book, is that genre is not merely a matter of form, or indeed an identity marker unto itself but rather the genre of a work affects how the reality and truth being dealt with in the work is presented. Form affects not only function but content and meaning. Why do you think it is that various previous discussions of the genre of Mark have been satisfied with... Read more

BEN. In the wake of the work of Richard Burridge and others, what was it that prompted you to write this book now? It must have taken a considerable period of time to do this book as it reflects a lot of detailed and helpful interaction with classics and ancient historical scholars. What fresh contribution do you see it making to an already ongoing discussion? HELEN: What prompted me to write the book in the first place was actually my... Read more

(Eerdmans, 360 pages) Helen Bond is a first rate Gospel scholar who has published important monographs on Pontius Pilate and Caiaphas among other helpful studies. Her most recent book entitled ‘The First Biography of Jesus‘ makes a detailed case that we must read Mark’s Gospels in light of ancient biographies and their conventions, as Mark’s Gospel fits well in that genre. Bond builds on the earlier important work of Richard Burridge among other NT scholars, but what really distinguished this... Read more

Valerius Maximus, an important Roman historian, whose writing career seems to have mainly transpired during the reign of Tiberius and a bit beyond (in this case A.D. 14-37) was a contemporary of Jesus, and the original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life. Like various other Greco-Roman writers he stresses the following about evaluating the character of important historical figures: “The condition of human life is chiefly determined by its first and last days, because it is of greatest importance under what auspices... Read more

It’s too bad this show which Jeff hosted, didn’t last long. Read more

A lustrum by definition is a period of five years. Yet it also can mean an expiatory sacrifice offered once every five years by the censor. Oddly, it can also mean debauchery, or in the plural the lair of a wild beast. All of these definitions come into play in this novel, the second of the three volumes of Robert Harris’ trilogy about Cicero, for at the end of tale Caesar is going off to serve five years in Gaul,... Read more