“What are they saying about…?” is the leading question for an older series of books that introduced readers and students (and those who didn’t have time to read all the major books and scholars) to a discipline. Reliable summaries of scholarship are a gold mine for the student, but no better gold mine is deeper than what I mention today: Alan J. Hauser and Duane F. Watson, fashion-designers of the journal Currents in Biblical Research (and which I co-edited with Alan... Read more

The question is about where to sit so one can get the best view of Jesus and hear every word. This is what Jonathan Pennington is doing in his new book The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. I like Pennington’s book because it makes me think and because it takes direct aim at a subject — the Sermon and virtue ethics — that is far more often simply assumed rather than discussed. After all, since “everyone” is a virtue... Read more

O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. BCP Read more

Fun news item WTTW: JULIA GRIFFIN: It was a routine patrol for a Sri Lankan naval team Tuesday morning, when they spotted something unusual bobbing among the ocean waves, not a bird or a boat, but rather a fully grown Asian elephant, struggling to stay afloat nearly 10 miles offshore. Elephants are some of the best swimmers of land mammals, thanks to buoyant bodies and trunks that can be used as snorkels, but this pachyderm appeared fatigued and distressed. Officials believe... Read more

By John Frye Eugene H. Peterson writes, “It surprises me when pastor friends are indifferent or hostile to poets. More than half our Scriptures were written by poets. … The first thing a poet does is slow us down. We cannot speed-read a poem. …When we are reading prose we are often in control, but in a poem we fell like we are out of control” (“Novelists, Pastors, and Poets” in Subversive Christianity, 180). Words matter to Christians and should... Read more

https://soundcloud.com/user-212639123/devloping-a-culture-of-generosity-part-1-kr-56 Read more

Christianity Today, by Kate Shellnutt: A day after a Religion News Service interview portrayed retired pastor and author Eugene Peterson as shifting to endorse same-sex marriage, the evangelical leader retracted his comment and upheld the traditional Christian stance instead. “To clarify, I affirm a biblical view of marriage: one man to one woman. I affirm a biblical view of everything,” he said in a statement Thursday afternoon. Peterson, best known for creating the paraphrased Bible translation The Message, also regrets... Read more

Can These Bones Live? This is the question posed in Chapters 10 and 11 of Alister McGrath’s book A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology where he gives a brief overview of the chemical requirements for the origin of life. A more recent book, A World From Dust: How the Periodic Table Shaped Life by Ben McFarland examines this in detail from the point of view of a biochemist. Chemistry constrains biology and evolution. There are... Read more

Greg Boyd focuses his book on God — that is, on theology proper. How we understand God, A.W. Tozer said a million times, determines everything.  So a critical element of Boyd’s The Crucifixion of the Warrior God is how he understands God. How does he? At the cross. His God is the Cruciform God, and that means everything to his hermeneutic of understanding everything else in the Bible, including his view of the violence-of-God passages. He opposes the Cruciform God to the... Read more

From Jonathan Merritt: RNS: You are Presbyterian, and your denomination has really been grappling with some of the hot button issues that we face as a culture. I think particularly of homosexuality and same-sex marriage. Has your view on that changed over the years? What’s your position on the morality of same-sex relationships? EP: I haven’t had a lot of experience with it. But I have been in churches when I was an associate pastor where there were several women... Read more