Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Obama explains why he has resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ

It’s not easy to find news reports which contain Obama's exact words. His comments are moving and his pain is palpable. An experience that lasted 20 years has been truncated. Here is the link to the key press conference. Here are some key graphs from the past few hours:

Common Ground between Complementarians and Egalitarians

Sarah Sumner is passionate about the need for comps and egals to strengthen the ties that bind and to work together rather than deny outright the validity of the other’s emphases. I already noted her ability to point out weaknesses in the egal point of view, though she herself is a strong supporter of women in roles of leadership within the church.

It cannot be stressed enough that the capacity for self-criticism is an essential prerequisite to genuine dialogue. Without it, debate becomes an exercise in crass manipulation.

A New Polyglot of the Hebrew Bible

Our anonymous correspondent and linguist extraordinaire from Papua New Guinea has an excellent post up on matters of interest to students of text criticism and the Septuagint. I was especially intrigued by the new Polyglot project he notes. That deserves a post of its own some day.

Obama’s Latest Pastor Disaster

That’s the title of a piece by fellow Society of Biblical Literature member and all-around enfant terrible Jacques Berlinerblau in today’s Washington Post. He is referring to a YouTube video of Father Michael Pfleger saying outrageous things about Hillary Clinton from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. For those not in the know, that is Barack Obama's church. In that context, as Barack recounts in his autobiography, he accepted Jesus Christ as his Savior.

Pfleger’s words are outrageous, and he has already apologized for them. With friends like Pfleger, I’m not sure Obama needs enemies. Berlinerblau goes on:

Why Al-Qaeda is losing - according to Andrew Sullivan

Al-Qaeda is losing. That’s the word on the street. I’m not so sure, but this comment by Andrew Sullivan, with whom I usually do not agree, is interesting:

What is the Debate between Complementarians and Egalitarians really about?

In this post, I summarize a proposal made by Sarah Sumner published last year and entitled “Forging a Middle Way Between Complementarianism and Egalitarianism” (full bibliographical information below). An evangelical with a Ph.D. from Trinity University Divinity School, she makes a bold claim from the start. She sees the controversy among complementarians and egalitarians as a test of the church’s faithfulness to the Gospel. It’s not about authority, as complementarians think. It’s not about justice, as egalitarians think. It’s about the integrity of the church’s life in God and the church's witness to the world [p. 250].

Why Theodicy is Misguided: Reframing the Debate

One might think that after the book of Job, no one would dare defend God again. After all, the would-be defenders of God in that book, Job’s three friends and the comical Elihu, are judged faithless by God.

In Praise of the ISV: Presenting the Ancient Multiformity of the Text

The International Standard Version (ISV) is a very promising work in progress. An innovative feature it has begun to incorporate in the notes to its translation of the Bible is an account of significant variants found among the Second Temple biblical manuscripts found at Qumran and elsewhere in Judean desert. Peter Flint, an excellent Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, is responsible for this aspect of ISV. The latest draft, v1.4.8, like those that went before, is available online. ISV Psalms and Proverbs now contain a set of textual footnotes the thoroughness of which, with respect to the Dead Sea Scrolls, is unparalleled in other available translations. Still, there is room for improvement, as I will show in this and following posts.

Why Mary Douglas had to learn Hebrew

Students of the Bible owe the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures a significant debt for making available a set of papers presented at a special session of the 2007 International SBL meeting in Vienna. The session’s title: Beyond Purity and Danger: Mary Douglas and The Hebrew Bible. So far I have made it through the introduction by Ronald Hendel and Saul M. Olyan and the papers written by those authors. A leading Douglasian quote in Hendel’s paper sums up the beauty of her approach in extremely short compass. It is from her essay entitled “Why I Have to Learn Hebrew”:

Does science make belief in God obsolete?

Thanks to the Templeton Foundation, a downloadable set of responses to this question from top scientists and others is available here. Richard Dawkins has called the Foundation a “diabolical” organization. Of course, a comment like that makes anything the Foundation does that much more interesting. Those the Foundation invited to answer the question are all – or almost all - exceptionally qualified to do so. Follow the links for background on the authors: