When teachers complain about the ways that schools evaluate our teaching–and we do so with frequency and enthusiasm–one of the common refrains has to do with the measuring instruments and…

Ask six Americans what the adjective or the noun “evangelical” means, and you’ll get as many answers.  Ask six historians, and you might get twelve.  But what if you ask…

Most of the world happens when I’m not in the room.  That’s been a guiding principle for me as I’ve read and heard about all kinds of things I’ve never…

 When Amaziah, Priest of the Shrine of Bethel, confronts the prophet Amos for conspiring against King Amaziah, Amos replies with a very specific denial: “I am no prophet, nor a…

In the middle of the twentieth century a process of collection started, one that would profoundly shape of Biblical studies for decades to come, all the way to our own…

Every story of thought and thinking runs into its own kinds of problems.  Progressive accounts do well showing how predecessors were not quite as sharp or as moral as we…

If a tree falls by an axe, the stump will, given enough time, grow back. Human beings who fall violently have no such hope–we never rise again.  With that image,…

Do not think any man happy until he has died, free from suffering.  That line, or something like it depending on the translator, ends the grand tragedy Oedipus Tyrannous, Oedipus…

 “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”  Growing up under that Constitutional law, even as an amendment, gave me the idea…

Liberty has always carried tricky questions with it.   Most folks in 2025 would agree that human beings should have liberty, but how one becomes free persists as a debate. …

My own tradition within the Church was an early adopter of the motto “No creed but Christ.” For what intentions are worth, my forerunners seem to have had good ones:…

When I was a novice in Biblical Studies Hans Frei’s book The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative invited me to consider not only the world that gave us the Bible but…

Slogans have always occupied our public attention, and the ways that an enemy redefines a slogan can be as important as the phrase’s original connotation.  We can learn a fair…

Taken down to their etymological components, scriptures are any written texts and literature is any human craft involving letters, usually of some alphabet or another.  But etymological roots don’t go…

 If you don’t spend much time around Biblical-studies people, the neologism “parallelomania” might be a new one on you, so let me explain: for different reasons, some writers in Biblical…