Apr 2, 2016

Free Audio Book: Taking God at His Word

Christianaudio.com is offering Kevin DeYoung's Taking God at His Word: Why the Bible is Knowable, Necessary, and Enough, and What That Means for You and Me as their free audio download for the month of April. You can access this offer here.

Apr 1, 2016

Free Logos Book for April: Athanasius: On the Incarnation of the Word of God

The free Logos Book for April is Athanasius: On the Incarnation of the Word of God. This book comes with audio. You can also purchase Tertullian Against Praxeas for $1.99. You can also enter to win the seven-volume Life and Works of Athanasius the Great. For all these offers you can go to the Logos' Free Book of Month page here.

Mar 31, 2016

Pillar New Testament Commentaries on Sale

The Westminster Bookstore is offering a sale on all the volumes of the Pillar New Testament commentary. Individual commentaries are at 40% off and the entire series for 50%. The sale ends April 6.

Shaping Sermons Like Scripture

I have just started reading Steven Smith's Recapturing the Voice of God: Shaping Sermons Like Scripture (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2015). Smith suggests that the better way to preach texts is by allowing the genre and structure of the text to drive the structure of the sermon.So far the book has thought-provoking, clear, and well-written. If you have the book or you might be interested to see what Smith is advocating you can watch these brief videos.

Recapturing the Voice of God #1 - Introduction
Recapturing the Voice of God #2 - Old Testament Narrative
Recapturing the Voice of God #3 - Law
Recapturing the Voice of God #4 - Gospel and Acts


HT: B&H Academic Blog

Mar 30, 2016

Salvaging a Bad Dissertation

Although this probably does not apply to the gifted readers of this blog, Rachel Herrmann provides some advice on how to salvage the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad dissertation here. There might also be some help here for really good dissertations.

Mar 29, 2016

Michael Holmes Festschrift

Michael Holmes, University Professor of Biblical Studies and Early Christianity at Bethel, was recently presented with a Festschrift entitled Studies on the Text of the New Testament and Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Michael W. Holmes on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday. You can read about the presentation here and look at the volume here.

Registry of the Priesthood

"The Temple Institute has announced a bold new initiative to identify, select and register kohanim-priests who would be eligible to participate in the process of preparing the Red Heifer, which is used in the ritual of purifying Jews from the tuma-impurity of the dead." You can read more about it here.

Mar 28, 2016

That Moment in the Classroom

Recently while browsing the books at a local Goodwill store, I happened upon a dirt-cheap copy of Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines. Browsing through the introduction, I read the author's description of a typical classroom experience. Although Foster's discipline is literature, it seems that his experiences are not all that different from those in biblical studies. Foster writes,
A moment occurs in this exchange between professor and student when each of us adopts a look. My look says, “What, you don’t get it?” Theirs says, “We don’t get it. And we think you’re making it up.” We’re having a communication problem. Basically, we’ve all read the same story, but we haven’t used the same analytical apparatus, If you’ve ever spent time in a literature classroom as a student or a professor, you know this moment. It may seem at times as if the professor is either inventing interpretations out of thin air or else performing parlor tricks, a sort of analytical sleight of hand (xiii). 
Been there. Done that.