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 Writings
Psalm 90 makes a fine reading for a new year. Through the psalm, time (and especially the haunting disparity between short brutish human time and the timeless divine reality) is a strong theme. The psalm is peppered with time words: dor generation in v.1 (x2) b’terem before in v.2 shanah year in vv.4, 5, 9, [...]
I feel inordinately virtuous. Before a lesurely breakfast of porridge with blueberries and brazil nuts at 9, I had not only fed my animals before I fed myself (as my grandad taught me) and read the blogs and “done” my email, as usual, but I’d marked the last of the late assignments, cut a couple [...]
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 [...]
Many teachers argue Proverbs is not merely a collection of ethical or moral rules. We stress the role of this teaching in forming the person. We notice how often the real wisdom consists not in knowing the words but in recognising when they are applicable. Thus, “contradictory” proverbs may both be true, and both collected, [...]
Humour and hurtfulness often go hand in hand. Comedians can hardly be squeamish about offending. Indeed one of the liberating possibilities humour opens for us is to make fun of the powerful. But often in everyday life the people humorists make fun of are not powerful, still less powerful and oppressive. Rather they are often [...]
For a course I am teaching next semester I need some examples of Christians using psalms in the contemporary world. I’ve been searching YouTube and TextWeek. Frankly I’m less than impressed that what I’m finding will really stimulate my students to themselves be creative and effective in using psalms :( Can any of you point [...]
Philip Davies is a hugely entertaining and lively speaker and always a provocative writer. I don’t agree with much that he has written, no one agrees with everything he writes, not even Philip agrees with everything he writes. (Perhaps?) But he has written one of the best interpretations of that horrible Psalm (137) that I [...]
The best loved Psalm is also one which comes alive the most when a little contextual light is shone upon it. <A Psalm of David.> Yhwh is my shepherd, I shall not be needy. Shepherds did not drive their flocks, or leave them out on the hills to fend for themselves. Because of the protection [...]
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 [...]
