Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The time has passed when liberal can be equated with caring and conservative with cold.
Arthur Brooks, the author of Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservativism (Basic, 2006) abbreviates that book’s argument in a January 24 letter published in the Wall Street Journal.
Income inequality is his topic. How the two political poles comprehend that fact on the ground is his lens. (more…)
Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Speech is an amazing thing.
The sheer computing power that would be required to match the human mind’s ability to decipher, manage, and create language on the fly is impossible to imagine. Yet we do it every day, effortlessly for the most part.
In fact, most human beings handle this astonishing feat in more than one language, simultaneously mastering two or more complex codes that are as much about culture and context as they are about language and linguistics. (more…)
Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The Biblical Archeology Review is the go-to popular guide to archaeology in the lands that have been variously named: biblical, holy, Syro-Palestinian, Levantine, and the like. Each of those adjective bears considerable ideological and political freight. (See my review on http://www.amazon.com).
BAR’s tireless and provocative editor, Herschel Shanks, has raised the Review’s status to the point that even professional archaeologists who profess no love for Shanks find it worthwhile to publish popularized reports of their findings in the periodical upon which has stamped his outsized image. (more…)
Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The Biblical Archaeology Review is the go-to popular guide to archaeology in the lands that have been variously named :biblical, holy, Syro-Palestinian, Levantine, and the like. Each of those adjectives bears considerable ideological and political freight. (more…)
Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »
I must confess to having missed the memo on The Da Vinci Code.
Many people have told me that they hated the poorly-written book but that the content ‘really makes you think.’ (more…)
Posted in denkschrift on July 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »
The Wall Street Journalhas in recent years distinguished itself for respectful coverage of religion. The Journal’s December 23-24, 2006 issue includes a sidebar by George Weigel entitled ‘Five Best. As Christmas nears, papal biographer George Wiegel selects essential books for understanding Christianity’.
If ‘understanding Christianity’ and ‘understanding Jesus’ can be as closely related as Weigel appears to think, then his list is noteworthy and insightful, both for the works it includes and for those that it does not. (more…)
Posted in clarity, denkschrift, missio dei on July 2, 2007| Leave a Comment »
James Chien Zo digs below the surface of intercultural contact in a fascinating contribution to Missiology: An International Review that draws from his own Asian-American immigrant experience (XXXII/1, 2004). In fact, he hints at his agonies by way of the ‘r’ word:
The most unequally treated people in America are not any one particular ethnic or gender group, but the immigrants. Because of their inability to survive in the mainstream, the Chinese immigrants are often labeled as racists by the equality activists, and most painfully, also by their own children.
Posted in denkschrift on July 2, 2007| Leave a Comment »
Thanks are due to an all-star foursome of biblical scholars and archaeologists who consented to being interviewed by Hershel Shanks, the peripatetic editor of the Biblical Archaeology Review (see my review at Amazon.com).
Under the title ‘Losing Faith: 2 Who Did and 2 Who Didn’t; How scholarship affects scholars’, Shanks elicits the thoughts of Bart Ehrman, Bill Dever, James Strange, and Larry Schiffman, four heavyweight and vociferous contemporary scholars.
It is the presumption of many in churches and synagogues that scholarship runs at cross purposes to faith and tradition. It is an open and anxious secret in the company of professional biblical scholars and archaeologists that faith often dies out amid the papyri and the strata. What is more, it is often assumed that the persistence of faith among scholars is a contradiction and an obstacle to honest inquiry.
Canter Bridge 