The Bible and Culture

It's nice to see a lad from my home town, High Point N.C. top the Sax poll.Here is what the voters named the top 50 jazz albums with sax as lead instrument. I mostly agree with this list, though I would definitely include a few more recent ones, like Branford Marsalis' wonderful "Eternal'. I also think Kind of Blue is too far down the list and where in the world is Coltrane's famous 'Ballads' CD?1. JOHN COLTRANE A Love Supreme (IMPULSE!, 1965) The modern saxophone vocabulary is … [Read more...]

It is story that is tragic in various ways. How would you like to be in jail and then on trial for forgery, theft, fraud, and then exonerated, and then not be given back the property that was taken from you by the antiquities police? Matthew Kalman, who has kept me up to speed on the developments throughout the trial, and is the only reporter to sit through the whole thing now has a couple of articles in the Jerusalem Post, to which he kindly gave me the link (see below). It is a cautionary … [Read more...]

This post is dedicated to someone who taught me a lot about love--- my sweet Christy girl, now with the Lord, but born on this day in 1979. I sure do miss you honey. Here is one of the first pictures I have of her when we brought her home from the hospital in Durham England.One of the benefits of reading the NT with the help of Greco-Roman rhetoric is that it allows you to hear the text as much of the Gentile world in NT times would have heard it. A good small example of the … [Read more...]

One of the things I have grown weary of in the last decade or so, is anti-ecclesial rhetoric. What I mean by this is the pitting of the ‘church’ over against Jesus, or ‘the established church’ over against more ‘organic’ models of Christianity (e.g. house churches, and the like). I suppose we all from time to time look for something or someone to blame our problems on, and the Christian church has become something of a punching bag, even for a goodly number of devout Christians. Sometimes t … [Read more...]

Quote of the Day: "They (mis)take lack of charity for zeal, and mutual ignorance for orthodoxy". --- Speaking about the problem of Protestants and Catholics in Ireland (C.S. Lewis, Letters: C.S. Lewis and Don Giovani Calabria Servant Books, 1988, p. 83). … [Read more...]

"A self-sufficient human being is sub-human...God has made us so that we will need each other."--- Desmond Tutu (quoted in K. Bailey, Paul through Mediterranean Eyes, (IVP, 2011), p. 344). … [Read more...]

Perhaps by now you have seen an episode of the TV show Swamp People. Pretty gnarly for sure. But those folks don't hold a candle to the real swamp people in the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild. Here is a brief synopsis of this film--- "In a forgotten but defiant bayou community cut off from the rest of the world by a sprawling levee, a six-year-old girl exists on the brink of orphanhood. Buoyed by her childish optimism and extraordinary imagination, she believes that the natural world is in … [Read more...]

Here is a nice article about Ryan Hall, who, about the time you read this, will be running in the London Olympic marathon for the U.S.http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sports/olympics/faith-is-central-to-marathoner-ryan-halls-approach.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha27_20120715And here was my experience running the Boston Marathon in 1993---- (that tiny fellow in the picture above is me crossing the finish line in Boston in 1993) O.k., so the picture is sideways. That’s about how I … [Read more...]

(Courtesy of the New Yorker) … [Read more...]