ACTS and MORE—Steve Walton’s blog on New Testament Studies

16 September 2019

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...

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9 September 2019

Sharing possessions in Acts

I recently gave a paper to a joint meeting of the Book of Acts and Use and Influence of the New Testament seminars at the British New Testament Society meeting in Liverpool. My full paper, offering an exegetical discussion of the sharing of possessions in Acts, especially in the early chapters, continues to be available for download for a short...

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2 September 2019

A very interesting piece on improving your writing

Scott Young is a fascinating man; he thinks hard about ‘ultralearning’, how we learn and how we can learn better. Here’s a link to a fascinating piece he’s recently published online, reflecting on how he might improve his writing (he’s already published five books!). It made me think a bit about how I work on my writing, while I’m working...

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24 July 2019

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...

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19 June 2019

My slides on improving your academic writing

I led a workshop at Trinity College, Bristol’s postgraduate research conference on improving your academic writing today, drawing on lots I’ve learned over the years of writing myself, and supervising and editing others who write. Here are the slides for those who’d like them. See also my review of How to Fix Your Academic Writing.

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16 May 2019

John Goldingay’s The Old Testament for Everyone series

It is my custom to read the whole Bible every year in my daily Bible reading, and I try to ring the changes on the system I use to do that each year. Over the year recently ended (I am not good at beginning exactly on 1 January!) I was using a reading system set up by a particular organisation...

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