What’s on the table when we claim that a newly-discovered text came from a Biblical author?  To answer that question might take an investigation that spans the Roman Empire, desert…

Tell me where you spend your Sunday mornings, and then where your grandmother spent her Sunday mornings, and I’ll venture a guess at what you think Christian art looks like. …

“I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom.”  When I first read those words from St. Paul, they inoculated me against certain…

The one who saves his life will lose it.  The one who sows to the spirit will reap life.  I am the way and the truth and the life.  Life…

Somethin’s brewin’ on the podcast.  I wonder what it could be?  If you’ve seen the stage musical version of “The Cotton Patch Gospel” you know what and whom we’re talking…

The book I expected to read would present all the ways in which human communities in the digital age are dealing with a decentralized authority structure, how any given woman…

Walter Brueggemann did not only teach me to read the Bible: he taught me to read.  In the twenty-two years since I first read A Theology of the Old Testament…

I don’t often talk about my own high-school years on this podcast, but I remember in high-school jazz band playing a Christmas medley called “Heaven and Nature Swing.” It led…

 Some intellectuals are famous, and some are intellectual-famous.  N.T. Wright appeared on The Colbert Report, and Reinhold Niebuhr testified before Congress, and Cornel West was in a couple Matrix movies. …

“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.”  I pray those words every Sunday morning at Bogart Christian Church, and I think I have a basic…

Every ethics presumes a sociology.  That formula has followed me through nearly twenty-five years of study, and its source text, After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, has been a constant conversation…

When we set several theologies next to each other, naming their core claims helps us to make sense of their relationships, even as we grant that more complexity rewards careful…

As a student in a good Old Testament Introduction class will be able to tell you, Genesis 1 borrows structures and symbols and maybe even vocabulary from Babylonian texts like…

When my students ask me–and soon enough they learn not to ask me–I always tell them I’m an unrepentant left-winger; after all, I’ve never thought that a Capetian monarch should…

Some truths seem self-evident once somebody has spoken them, but someone needs to make that move.  So here goes: whenever any of us teaches, that teacher teaches something.  Teaching a…