RT @TheArcadian: A. Jacobs on Literary Executors \\ Hey, that's me!

Must-read @NickKristof: #Obama's failed #Sudan policy. Conflict could turn into world’s bloodiest war. #tcot #p2

I think David Brooks's commencement speech at Occidental College is just fantastic:

finally had a chance to read @tcarmody's "10 Reading Revolutions" ... hello, class reading & blogging assignment!

Me on the whole open-access peer review thing:

@wesleyhill Frank Beckwith points this out:

... and reminded again of the oddity of appealing to Mere Christianity as one's "creed." The problem with it: (2/2)

Just read about Dinesh D'Souza's strange brand of Catholic evangelicalism (1/2)

Via Paul Franks:

It looks like there are now a few solutions for using GroupWise on iOS devices. This guy has a review of each on his blog. http://johnkendrickonline.com/2010/05/11/groupwise-on-the-iphone/

The most recent comment also mentions that GroupWise is now testing a way to connect via ActiveSync, so it may not be worth buying these apps. I'm not sure if that means we could also set up an Exchange account with Mail.app, but at least it would be a native iPod Touch solution.

RT @LettersOfNote: New Letter: Thomas Pynchon on plagiarism // his comments are quite interesting

Getting the Tweet Button bookmarklet -- easy link tweeting from your browser bar:

Leo uses. If I ever go back to comments this might be the way to go.

Art student paints herself having sex with presidents, in order. Pretty great:

RT @bookoven: amazing photo essay of people reading books, from all over the world:

BibleBlogs: A new Hebrew grammar: A NEW HEBREW GRAMMAR: John A. Cook and Robert D. Holmstedt, Biblical Hebrew: An...

So exciting! Adobe partners with @Typekit to bring legendary typefaces to the web:

Didn't expect to see a penetrating critique of 'hip' churches in the Wall Street Journal. Check it out here

A site to feed one's (read: my) obsession with filled bookshelves -

Phrases forbidden to members of They Might Be Giants:

Book History & Print Culture at the U of Toronto:

on Google Wave and "failed" experiments

If five million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, ah, where'd it go?

On clergy health, stress, despression, obesity and burnout:

One of the greatest profiles ever written.

As someone who uses Keynote as his primary design tool, I'm very excited about the $12 Keynote Wireframe Toolkit!

Asking my blog readers to help me come up with cool new net-based assignments for one of my classes:

Totally using this as a separator in my bookmark lists:

Jesus is Coming Back When? – A Crash Course in Evangelical Views of Eschatology

Also by Cathy Davidson: why she stopped reading with e-readers:

Don't know how I missed this, but interesting thoughts on teaching & scholarship from Cathy Davidson:

Most infuriating fact in @emilybazelon's terrific NYTM abortion piece: Medicaid won't cover IUD insertion after delivery.

So cool! Try web FontFonts on any website.

The best poems for kids are weird, wild, and scary. These are Robert Pinsky's favorites.

Stanley Hauerwas and the university:

1/3 of world's bloggers are in US; 4X that of the next country, Britain; most in NY State & Ontario

1996 audio of David Foster Wallace

Students with a .edu email address can get Amazon Prime free for a year: (@pomoeschatology)

Cool dorm poster-like picture of ancient biblical cosmology:

Kingsmill’s intertextual method is disciplined by close attention to clusters of allusions
and even to precise morphological and grammatical echoes, which sometimes yields
surprising results. A strong example is her reading of the poem of praise addressed to the
dancing Shulamite (Song 7:1–6). The passage begins with a verb denoting visionary
seeing, and it includes ten nouns with the second-person feminine suffix—a grammatical
form, she observes, that prophetic texts use most often in address to cities. Moreover,
most of these particular nouns—“your navel,” “your breasts,” “your nose,” and so on—
“only occur otherwise in address to Jerusalem” (146)! Based on these and other linguistic
data, she concludes that “the description of the human body piles on indications that it
represents a geographic area … of which Jerusalem is the centre and of which, in turn, the
centre is the Temple” (130–31). As a complement, she notes with C. T. R. Hayward that
“The ‘praise of Wisdom’ abounds in geographical references.” In comparison with this
sort of precision, most intertextual studies attempted by biblical scholars, including
myself, might be judged impressionistic.

The Internet can make you well-informed and/or hip, but not wise. Nice culture-making turn at the end of this by Brooks:

works with pinboard

and Pinboard

RT @pegobry Amazing, must read. RT @TPCarney @WSJopinion: Manute Bol's Radical Christianity

38. Alan Cooper
(posted June 24, 2010)

Those interested in the history of scholarship on this topic might wish to (re)visit Jacques Berlinerblau’s essay, “What’s Wrong With the Society of Biblical Literature?” in the November 10, 2006 issue of the Chronicle for Higher Education. See also the letters in the January 12, 2007 issue and Berlinerblau’s response to them (February 9). Also Michael Fox’s challenging posting on the SBL Forum, “Bible Scholarship and Faith-Based Study: My View,” http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=490, which provoked many responses, including an interesting one from Berlinerblau, “The Unspeakable in Biblical Scholarship,” http://www.sbl-site.org/publications/article.aspx?articleId=503 . On the way the field has been transformed over the years—mostly for the better, in my view—may I immodestly recommend my article, “Biblical Studies and Jewish Studies,” in the Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, edited by Martin Goodman and published in 2002. I use a lot of this material in a seminar on “Methods of Biblical Interpretation” in order to stimulate discussion among the students about what it means for them to be members of the “guild.” I wonder if my friend Ron and those who are responding to him know that they are walking along a well-trodden path. By an odd coincidence, last year I was invited to speak on “A Jewish View of Historical Criticism” in the SBL Christian Theology and the Bible Section (sic!). It was a terrific session, with both panelists and audience deeply engaged in the topic. It manifested the openness, eclecticism, and diversity of the society nowadays, in vivid contrast to the (critical) methodological dogmatism that predominated in my student days. Unlike Ron, I feel more comfortable now at the annual meeting than I did in the old days. There’s plenty of stuff at the meeting that I don’t like or that I think is silly, and guess what: I don’t go to those sessions.

including the Deuterocanonical Books, a.k.a. the Apocrypha

c. 1450
Tempera on panel, 39 x 39 cm
Museo di San Marco, Florence

Web Gallery of Art

Assigned for Fall 2010: "The book presents texts drawn from the complete range of biblical literature, exposing the student to all the major styles of Hebrew found in the Bible. It also provides extensive explanations of the chosen texts, focusing on structure, genre, literary devices, and accents. There are assignments for classroom use, and space is available for student responses. The book includes topics for further thought and suggestions for further reading on specific issues."

Acedia and adacemic life: (a touch of the distinctive academic self-pity, but insightful all the same)

The Codex Sinaiticus Project is an international collaboration to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, conservators and curators, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript.

I need to review this.

BibleBlogs: Cambridge University Digitization Project: Certainly a worthwhile project.  Have a look!
Share on Face...

A reprint.

T&T Clark has issued a reprint, available on Dove Books for $21.99.

A reader app that works with pinboard. Hooray. (Merlin Mann's pick of the week once.)

Superb on paper, even better live

Steven Johnson on his writing workflow: "My word processors have varied over the years: I swore off MS Word after Mind Wide Open, and used Nisus Writer for Everything Bad and Ghost Map; had a quick dalliance with Pages, and then actually returned to the latest version of Word for Invention. But the one constant for the past four books has been an ingenious piece of software called Devonthink, which is basically a free-form database that accepts many different document types (PDFs, text snippets, web pages, images, etc). It has a very elegant semantic algorithm that can detect relationships between short excerpts of text, so you can use the software as a kind of connection machine, a supplement to your own memory."

"a major part of the books listed are commentaries. Other sections, at the beginning and the end of this bibliography, deal with such essential matters as the Introduction to the study of the Old Testament, history and archaeology of the ancient Near East, and Old Testament theology."

Latest revision on August 20, 2009

For the most part, this list considers English language studies and exegetical commentaries that have appeared within the last quarter of a century. However, there is much of value that predates this period. For one of the most useful and wide ranging bibliographies of earlier works, see:

Childs, Brevard S. Old Testament Books for Pastors and Teachers. Westminster, 1977.

Our hope is that the following list will continue to prove useful by regular updating. An older form of this annotated bibliography can be found in R. S. Hess and G. J. Wenham, eds., Make the Old Testament Live: From Curriculum to Classroom. Eerdmans, 1998, pp. 191-218. The volume itself is a unique collection of essays on teaching the Old Testament from a variety of perspectives. A special note of appreciation is due to Robert Hubbard and the late Robert Alden, whose earlier bibliography formed the basis for what follows

Ayjay's preferred Everything Bucket.

The devouring mouth of hell reminds of Bynum's book, as well as Jonah / Ex 15 / etc.

Walking into Howard Lerner's studio is like falling headfirst into a Tanach made of sculpture. Right near the door is a 10-foot high Tower of Babel. Partially hidden behind this behemoth is a thoroughly idiosyncratic Vision of Ezekiel. Further along into the somewhat cluttered, but not chaotic, studio is a vista of massive sculptures; The Ark of the Covenant looms ahead while Elijah's Ascension is on the left, just past a 10 foot depiction of Enoch. To be totally honest, it's all a bit frightening.

Interesting associations and questions surround the formation of the Christian (and Jewish) Biblical canons as they became fixed by the middle of the fifth century. During the twentieth century and into the current decade the field concentrated on gathering relevant evidence, and then reading that evidence closely to see which authors/communities accepted which texts as sacred and when, and how firm the boundaries were between sacred, acceptable, and condemned texts.1 While these works eradicated the previous teleological assumption that somehow the eventual New Testament texts were intrinsically more central to Christianity, their agenda also narrowed the scholarship to repeatedly addressing questions of dating and community. But scholars of canonization have begun to address two wider clusters of questions, approaches, and explanations for the canons.

Why have I never found this website before now? I always wound up at the Eisenbrauns site instead.

I expect to receive this volume for review shortly. It's already got serious praise from some of the OT/HB scholars I watch closely, including: Gary Anderson, Walter Moberly, Jon D. Levenson.

The above link is e-proxied for Tyndale students. It's a companion to the text I've recently adopted for my OT Introduction (RLGS 1013).

Sign up today for a free trial and to receive Oxford Bibliographies News.

Oxford Bibliographies Online is a new type of online resource designed to help scholars and students find reliable sources of information by directing them to the best available scholarly materials in whatever form or format they appear from books, chapters, and journal articles to online archives, electronic data sets, and blogs.

For OT Intro students: see especially chs 2 and 3 for a discussion of the problem of history and the patriarchal narratives.

Purdue Professor Embeds Hyperlinks in Printed Books - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Indecision Man II