Latest Book Updates

Well, I've been posting pictures so much lately that I haven't put much into writing here. Newborn baby, I say, newborn baby!

But here are a couple reading updates. I finished, not too long ago, N.T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God, and I feel like I could write a syllabus for and teach a New Testament Introduction course now. Wright carefully set up a framework that takes into acocunt the historical and the literary and the theological, the Jewish and the Greek and the Roman, the preacher and the scholar and the skeptic. And he held it together for four hundred-plus pages.

I've also received a couple books as birthday gifts (I turn 28 tomorrow): The Barbarian Way by Edwin McManus and Overhearing the Gospel by Fred Craddock. I'm probably going to use McManus as a brief break from Wright's dense prose, then read the rest of Wright's Jesus and the Victory of God (just dying to put in a joke about 'rithmetic here), then take on Craddock. All these are books I want to tackle before the summer's out.

In the fall, I'm taking two Shakespeare classes and hopefully working on a "Hebrew Bible and/as Literature" syllabus to present to the English department. Part of my motivation is to get another "classes taught" line on my CV (that list grew this semester at Emmanuel), but I'd also like to teach some Bible, and this seems like a challenging context in which to try it. So I'm off to UGA on Wednesday (probably) to get some paperwork and start writing! Woo hoo!