Category: Study

Some helpful pieces on planning and study

I’ve been finding a number of really helpful pieces on different aspects of planning, research and study recently, and here share three of my favourites. Here is a belter of a piece by the wonderful Katherine Firth about ‘Taking a critical distance break’, explaining the very helpful process of stepping back from a project you’re engrossed in, to give yourself...

A fascinating discussion of Matthew Novenson’s The Grammar of Messianism

There’s a really interesting conversation about Matthew Novenson’s fascinating The Grammar of Messianism going on at Syndicate, the home of many such book discussions, at present. A key claim of the book is that it helps to think about ‘Messiah’ passages in Jewish and Christian texts as engaging in a ‘language game’ in which they use the term in a...

An excellent new book on fixing academic writing problems

Inger Mewburn, Katherine Firth and Shaun Lehmann,How to Fix Your Academic Writing Trouble:A Practical Guide London/New York: Open University Press, 2018ISBN 978-0-3352-4332-7xi + 163 pages; £23.99 (paperback) £20.51 (Kindle edition) This outstanding short book will be of immense value to research students and their supervisors. The authors aim to address common issues which PhD students face in writing their thesis, and provide practical advice on how to tackle...

A new book: Poverty in the Early Church and Today—A Conversation

I’m delighted to announce the publication of a new book which I’ve co-edited with Hannah Swithinbank of Tearfund, Poverty in the Early Church and Today—A Conversation (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019). Here’s an abstract for the whole book: Poverty, its causes and alleviation, are a perennial concern for humanity, and particularly for Christians because of their belief that all people are made in God’s image, and therefore valued...