Tag Archives: Scripture

Simon Gathercole on Tom Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God

26 July 2014 by Steve Walton
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  Here’s a fresh, generous and stimulating review of N. T. Wright’s big Paul and the Faithfulness of God by my friend Simon Gathercole, who teaches in the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge. I’ve greatly enjoyed reading Simon’s review, which is gracious and clear, and clarifies and maps areas of agreement and disagreement nicely. It’s preparing me for reading Wright himself—I am going to take the big book on hols and will hope to blog about it.

A valuable online resource from SBL

9 July 2014 by Steve Walton
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  The Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) have just released their excellent new online resource, Bible Odyssey. It’s a very useful set of articles, aimed at a ‘lay’ audience (although it will be of great value to students, I reckon), about aspects of the Bible. It is well-organised around a series of ‘hubs’, which are places, people or passages. This release of the site has 20-24 items under each of those links, and then each place, person or passage leads to a bunch of other Continue reading →

An evil success! The St Mary’s conference on evil

26 May 2014 by Steve Walton
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I’m delighted to report that the first conference organised by the Centre for Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St Mary’s University, Twickenham was a resounding success. About fifty of us met to hear papers and engage in fascinating conversation about the topic of evil across a wide range of texts in the Second Temple and early Christian period. My esteemed colleague Chris Keith had done a masterly job in putting this together. Here are some notes on papers which caught my ear—that’s not to say Continue reading →

Stunning video of a river flooding a dry riverbed

27 March 2014 by Steve Walton
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This is a stunning video of huge rainfall in the hill refilling the River Zin in the Negeb. The villagers are gathered to watch this amazing event. This illuminates Isaiah 44:3 ‘I will pour out water on the thirsty land and streams on the dry ground’ or Psalm 126:4 ‘Restore our fortunes, O YHWH, like the watercourses in the Negeb’—verses that make sense in the context of Israel/Palestine in a way that they rarely (although occasionally) do for a westerner like me. 2 minutes 45 Continue reading →

Two scintillating links

5 February 2014 by Steve Walton
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Here are two scintillatingly good links to pieces I’ve really enjoyed watching (the video) and reading (Joel Green’s article). The video is a short (12 mins) talk by Ian McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, one of the most interesting books of recent times. McGilchrist is a neuroscientist who reflects seriously, and non-superficially, about the relation of the two hemispheres of the brain, and rejects the popular ‘left brain = rational, right brain = creative’ approach. He draws fascinating implications for the dominance of Continue reading →