If you would like a review copy of the print version of my new book: Tim Bulkeley, Not Only a Father: Talk of God as Mother in the Bible & Christian Tradition (Signs) Auckland: Archer Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-1468091373 Please contact me, please say both where you expect to publish the review (blogs are quite [...]
Browsing Posts in History
Open Bible has a fascinating on post Applying Sentiment Analysis to the Bible. Sentiment analysis involves algorithmically determining if a piece of text is positive (“I like cheese”) or negative (“I hate cheese”). Think of it as Kurt Vonnegut’s story shapes backed by quantitative data. The post started with a plot of the data for [...]
In comments on the previous post Jeremy raises the question of 1 Sam 15. Which seems a worse problem. There (1 Sam 15:2-3 ) Samuel, in God’s name, instructs the newly anointed king, Saul, to slaughter all the Amalekites. He explicitly orders that non-combatants like women, small children and babies be included in the massacre. [...]
I was asked an interesting question: How did Jewish people feel about having Rahab (the foreign prostitute) in their family tree? My suspicion is that the question itself presupposes bourgeois attitudes. Members of the underclasses surely have a better understanding of the economic and social pressures that cause women to become prostitutes. One should not [...]
There’s quite a bit of talk at the moment in the world I inhabit about two related issues: Neo-Atheists attack Scripture claiming it advocates genocide, portrays God as a monster etc., for the sake of simplicity I’ll focus on one issue, the claim that God commands genocide. I’m supervising a Master’s thesis on a topic [...]
As an INFP (on the MBTI) I naturally tend to avoid obvious solutions in favour of more “creative” ones – often to the exasperation of innocent bystanders, like parents, spouse, colleagues and in more recent days children. As a preacher, this tendency means that I have seldom treated the familiar Sunday School Story passages. I [...]
This post is stimulated by two things: last night I was interviewed before I preached on the Song of Songs, and was asked the interesting question of how experience crossing cultures (which has been a feature of my life into Congo, then New Zealand and more recently the Karen people in the refugee camp in [...]
Edited repost from Sept 2004 The world has changed… My parents’ generation made legal divorce a less painful process. My generation has ran behind, and overtook them – the statistics are terrible. Marriages don’t last (at least not in the affluent egotistical West). Among our kids’ friends from school there were always more “broken” or [...]
So, how did I preach about “Helicopter gunships in Joel“? As I said, this was part of a series on “How to Read the Bible” and though the sermon was on Joel 2:5-8 the title was “The Bible is NOT a code book… the Bible means what it says“. I’m uploading my presentation and an [...]
Photo by Chris M0EEG My problem is a variant of Lingamish’s, but with existential urgency. He asked about one sort of almost unpreachable text (the vengeance passages in the OT) whether he should not just cut the Gordian knot and hack them from Scripture. I am preaching this Sunday (tomorrow already :( I have to [...]
