Yesterday I was asked: If Noah lived before the law was revealed to Moses, how did he know how to distinguish “clean” and “unclean” animals? It is still holiday time (it’s the summer in NZ, though with all the rain and cold in recent weeks you wouldn’t believe it) so my answer was less full [...]
Browsing Posts in Reading
I have read the Bible professionally, and encouraged and taught others to read it, in three continents. The situations differed, including an African and a Western University, a Baptist theological college and a Bible School in a refugee camp. I have also supervised some exciting theses that develop interesting perspectives on understanding the Bible. So [...]
It’s the silly season, I’ve nearly finished the marking, but only “nearly”. So I needed some silliness. In an effort to demonstrate “scientifically” that Ruth was written by women I submitted the first chapter in various translations to the Gender Analyser. The results were uninspiring, it reckons with varying degrees of confidence that the chapter [...]
If yesterday’s post seemed a trifle touchy, it’s because the author I was criticising was himself unbalanced. I can rectify that today thanks to Jim W who pointed to this: 5 Ways That Paper Books Are Better Than eBooks this list is balanced and sensible, it takes the technological differences into account and points out [...]
At 5 Minute Bible I have begun podcasting examples of humour from every book of the (Hebrew at least)1 Bible. But five books in, I accepted that David Ker’s other challenge. Scripture comes to us from long, long ago and from far, far away, cross cultural humour is always difficult. What is riotously funny to [...]
The Books and Publishing blog (it comes from the organisers of the annual Book Conference and the International Journal of the Book) has reprinted an extract of an article from the LA Times, using the title “E-books are good news for the literary world”. B & P is a fairly conservative blog, linked closely to [...]
Today was Carey Principal’s Day (sort of a staff retreat under another name) two experiences have me thinking about how our changing communications technologies are changing libraries. The first was driving up for the day. Our “farm” is three hours away, so on the journey I listened to some great radio, from the BBC and [...]
Jonathan (my always stimulating, still just, but soon moving on, colleague) of ξἐνος pointed me to a piece in the NY TImes by Lisa W. Foderaro “In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to Paper Textbooks“. This may be, and much of it reads like, the traditional claim that “books won’t disappear anytime soon”, digital [...]
Mark Meynell (All Souls, Langham Place) has a fine list of 20 questions to ask when reading a novel. The list is introduced by an interesting post, but if you just want the list you can scroll down to the Scribd window. It’s good thoughtful stuff that could enrich our reading (at least for the [...]
Johnathan at ξἐνος has posted a striking announcement of an exciting new technological breakthrough: New Technology Coming Soon!!!!!!! Despite his predilection for exclamation marks, and despite the video being in Spanish, you probably ought to watch it before the one I repeat below (in Norwegian, but both have subtitles for the linguistically challenged) ;)
