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James Chien Zo and Missiology

July 2, 2007 by David Baer

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.

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Joshua 3-4: What are these stones?

July 2, 2007 by David Baer

By the time the son asked the question, the stones would have been bleached whiter than when they were carried dripping from the Jordan’s path. Each would have become a fixture in its place, stumbled upon at night. Perhaps the boy who asked the question would have mounted the stone in a child’s victory and proclaimed himself king over the place a year or two before it came to him to ask the awaited question.

The father must have grinned when it came: ‘What are these stones?’

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Tucker

July 2, 2007 by David Baer

I love animals.

Proof of this comes in the two- and four-legged denizens of our home and the birds that have flocked to my backyard feeders on three continents.

Tucker is my dear, muttish Labrador Retriever. Like all Labbies, his intellect is overpowered by his instinct for giving and receiving affection. Tucker was the product of an unplanned mating on a Costa Rican farm four years ago.

During a four-year sojourn in a tiny, drafty apartment in Cambridge, England (1994-1998), we had promised our sons Christopher and Johnny that when we returned to Costa Rica—our adoptive country —we would have at least one dog and one cat.

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Scholarship and Losing Faith

July 2, 2007 by David Baer

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.

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