A New Brazilian Bible Blogger

Her name is Cláudia Andréa Prata Ferreira, and she is professor of Hebrew Literature at the University of Rio di Janeiro. She has four blogs up and running, each of which has a unique set of links. She offers a number of helpful reviews of Brazilian scholarship.

The blogs are:

estudos bíblicos

lingua hebraica

estudos judaicos

história das Religiões e Religiosidades

I have a fondness for Brazilian Biblical scholarship. It all began while I was a student in Germany at the Kirchliche Hochschule Bethel under Frank Crüsemann and Christof Hardmeier. Fellow students included two blond, blue-eyed Brazilians named Ivoni and Haraldo Reimer. It was enjoyable to have Latin Lutheran friends who struggled with German culture as much as I did and for the same reason: Latins can be loose and informal, with a ready smile, while Germans can be a bit uptight and stand-offish. I was like them in a way: blood-wise, a northern European (Swedish, English, Scotch-Irish), I had lived so long in Italy and thought and dreamed in Italian so long, being Latin had become second nature.

God did a wonderful thing, I think, in creating a German Lutheran diaspora in Brazil. Brazilians are a wonderful people, and while I wish only the best for Brazilian Catholicism, it does not surprise me that a growing number of Brazilians are becoming Pentecostals or evangelicals of other sorts.

It’s the trouble with Catholicism everywhere: it’s not catholic enough. The old Protestant criticism that Catholicism is a mixture of opposites, as if that were a bad thing, is of course its strength. Wherever Catholicism is a people’s birth right, but proves unable to slake the spiritual thirst of the masses and to empower the laity in the expression of the spiritual gifts God pours out upon them, it loses ground to evangelical “sects” which, sometimes poorly, sometimes excellently, provide them with a spiritual home.

Milton Schwantes happens to be the Brazilian OT scholar I’ve learned the most from, but that’s just me. Brazilian biblical scholarship: it’s a world worth exploring.

Comments

[Lingamish]

Muito obrigado! Vou lá agora para fazer um pouco de leitura.

[JohnFH]

Well, aren't you full of surprises, David. I envy you for your fluent Portuguese.