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Humility in the Academy

September 2, 2011 in Teach, Theology with 0 Comments

A couple of gems to encourage you to read the rest of the article:

My first minor setback occurred during my freshman year, when the morons on Princeton’s English faculty inexplicably failed to be dazzled by my freshman essay. (“You show a hint of promise, but you need to work much harder on your writing.”) …

Until that point, I had never really appreciated what a liberal education is all about. An essayist inThe Chronicle has put it this way: “A liberal-arts education … is about the recognition, ultimately, of how little one really knows, or can know. A liberal-arts education, most of all, fights unmerited pride by asking students to recognize the smallness of their ambitions in the context of human history ….”

Head over to the Chronicle of Higher Education to read this wonderful piece about the need for humility in the Academy.

Also, shout out to liberal-arts education.

Systematizing the Old Testament Narrative?

August 26, 2011 in Theology with 0 Comments

From A Theological Introduction to the Old Testament:

The medieval church, and in large measure the later Reformation churches, preserved the canon of the Old Testament but largely subsumed its theological voice to categories taken from systematic or dogmatic theology. The result was, in considerable measure, a monochromatic view of the canonical witness. The polyphonic voices of the Old Testament with their unsettled diversity of witness were often pressed into artificial unity through systematic categories brought from outside the text itself. Attempts to describe the Old Testament’s theological witness often used the categories common to systematic theology. Elements deemed inconsistent with church doctrine were ignored or treated as marginal to the theological understanding of the Old Testament.

Did the reformation overly systematize the Old Testament narrative?

Good Read: The World Without Scholars

August 17, 2011 in Teach, Theology with 0 Comments

Michah Gottlieb, assistant professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at NYU, writes a brief, creative and though-provoking fable about a world without the humanities. Excerpt below, click through for the rest.

With family income shrinking, and tax revenues dwindling, choices had to be made. One of the first places looked at was those costly ivory-tower humanities scholars. How could one justify paying salaries to people who spent years studying minutiae but not producing anything of measurable economic value?

Research in computer science, engineering, finance, and hard sciences that led to technological and medical discoveries was preserved. Humanities research in fields such as history, religion, philosophy, and literature was cut. Eventually humanities research slowed to a trickle. Departments shrank and then collapsed. The university became a technology lab and trade school.

Read the rest from the Chronicle of Higher Education.

First Century Jewish Stories

July 8, 2011 in Theology with 0 Comments

To be more explicit: first-century Jews, like all other peoples, perceived the world, and events within the world, within a grid of interpretation and expectation. Their particular grid consisted at its heart of their belief that the world was made by a good, wise and omnipotent god, who had chosen Israel as his special people; they believed that their national history, their communal and traditional story, supplied them with lenses through which they could perceive events in the world, through which they could make some sense of them and order their lives accordingly. They told stories which embodied, exemplified and so reinforced their worldview, and in so doing threw down a particularly subversive challenge to alternative worldviews. Those who wished to encourage their fellow-Jews to think differently told the same stories, but with a twist in the tail. The Essenes told a story about the secret beginning of the new covenant; Josephus, a story about Israel’s god going over to the Romans; Jesus, a story about vineyard-tenants whose infidelity would cause the death of the owner’s son and their own expulsion; the early Christians, stories about the kingdom of god and its inauguration through Jesus. But one thing they never did. They never expressed a worldview in which the god in question was uninterested in, or uninvolved with, the created world in general, or the historical fortunes of his people in particular.

The New Testament and the People of God, N.T. Wright

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