The Eagle & Child

A couple of weeks ago Madeline walked into our room at 7:00 a.m. and came to my side of the bed. She said, “Dad, have you read Psalm 91? It’s really good.”  She had woken us up, so I mumbled something about “Probably” and “I’ll read it when I got up.” I wish now I had [...]

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Does [the Bible] match up with scientific evidence? Who cares? … I do not believe science, history or archaeology of any kind establishes the truthfulness of the scripture in any way. Scripture is true by virtue of God speaking it. If God spoke poetry, or parable, or fiction or a prescientific description of creation, it [...]

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Scot McKnight has started a series of posts on “Translation Tribalism”: 1 and 2 (so far). From the second post: the authority is the original text, not the translation. The original texts are in Hebrew and Aramaic (Old Testament) and Greek (New Testament). The authoritative text is not in English, regardless of how accurate the [...]

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Well, how’s this for a kick in the pants: Zondervan will “discontinue putting out new products with the TNIV” (Today’s New International Version.  via Brad Boydston).  It’s kind of a vague phrase: does it mean simply that they’ll continue to publish what they’re already publishing, but nothing new?  Or do they mean that they are [...]

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The whole alcohol debate is old news for me, as most of you know, but when I see a view from a different angle, I like to collect it here for future reference.  From The Search, via Jesus Creed: . . . [W]hat about alcohol is so inherently bad? The obvious answer is that it [...]

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At Midwinter Conference in Chicago I was made aware of the recent release of two books isolating the words of Jesus in scripture: The Words of Jesus (Phyllis Tickle) and The Red Letters (Timothy Beals).  Phyllis Tickle said that the result was so powerful that her publisher insisted that she add headings and breaks so as not [...]

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After my last post I was thinking about all the bibles I’ve had over the years.  Here is chronology of those bibles (now that I’ve written it I’m reluctant to post it, because I might look like a crazy): 1.  Early childhood — I had a children’s bible of one sort or another.  I’m pretty [...]

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I caught a bit of Ideas on CBC Radio One.  I see now that it’s an interview with Susan Neimann, author of Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists (sounds like just the book for me).  I’ll have to listen to the podcast of the full program later, but she talked about some interesting things in [...]

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Which translation of the Bible do you use? (AKA, my defense of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible) I grew up with the New International Version (NIV)—standard text, I think, for my generation of evangelicals—and I still use it: I use an NIV Thompson Chain Reference Bible and have an exhaustive concordance based [...]

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From Jesus Shaped Spirituality: The answers we give each other suck. The answers in the Bible are big, generic and can’t be fit into the map of your life as specifically as you want. God wants us to trust who he is, what he’s done for us in Jesus and what he promises to finish [...]

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