A great championship gave us a great champion.  Darren Clarke from Northern Ireland.  Much has been written about him and the twists and turns his life has taken.  Here’s the piece from the Belfast Telegraph.  He’s the third Ulsterman to win a major out of the last six, which is extraordinary. Phil Mickelson has […]

The “new perspective” era in Pauline studies had its heyday through the final two decades of the 20th century, dying out in the later 1990’s.  After the publication of E. P. Sanders’s book, Paul and Palestinian Judaism in 1977, Pauline scholars around the world produced a flood of dissertations, monographs, and articles re-evaluating previous assumptions […]

I mentioned the other day that the “new perspective” era in Pauline studies is in the past.  Confusion, however, abounds regarding what it is and what it isn’t.  What follows is an attempt at clarification. The “new perspective” is an interpretive angle of approach to Paul that does not assume that he is attacking Judaism […]

Alister McGrath on Wright: Wright’s project is like a gadfly to evangelical theology.  It is an irritant, a stimulus, that demands we reexamine our ways of thinking and interpreting Scripture, particularly Paul’s writings, to see whether we have fallen into settled and lazy ways of thinking that, in the end, fail to do justice to […]

My kids and I were joking the other day about this common saying.  A day later, someone used it with reference to something I had written. I find this idiomatic proverb so totally frustrating and backward.  In common usage, to have one’s cake and to want to eat it is regarded as a bad thing. […]

In this month’s Christianity Today, David Neff interviews Kallistos Ware of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Neff mentions the Protestant impulse “to crystallize a central message and a central experience.”  He asks whether the fullness of the faith in the Orthodox church sometimes obscures the faith’s center. Neff’s identification of this “boiling down” impulse stuck with […]

This NY Times article tells the story of a young couple who wrote a book about the biblical mandate for natural family planning.  They subsequently had four children, moved from Wisconsin to Nashville, repudiated their views on birth control, divorced, and now share custody of their children. It’s a sad story when one considers their […]

That may seem like an odd title.  My friends and colleagues in religious studies will think immediately of an entire host of fundamentalist errors.  I’m thinking, however, of George Marsden’s description of a fundamentalist with reference to David Bebbington’s four-fold definition of an evangelical. Bebbington claims that four features constitute an evangelical: Biblicism, cruci-centrism, conversionism, […]

One of my favorite weeks of the year is here–the week of The Open Championship.  Most Americans know it as the British Open, but when it began it had nothing else from which to distinguish it.  So it’s just The Open Championship. This year it’s being played at Royal St. George’s in Sandwich, England, the southernmost course […]

The field of Pauline studies is well past the “new perspective” era.  The interpretive insights gained over the last thirty years or so have been supremely helpful for coming to grips with Paul’s relationship to his Jewish heritage and his discussions related to the Mosaic Law.  Debates doubtless will continue in forthcoming books and commentaries […]