The Edmonton Journal published a very positive article on Christian university education in which Taylor University College receives a fair bit of attention. While I was interviewed, along with the Academic Vice President of Taylor (Dr. David Williams — no relation), I was not quoted (and I am not bitter, really!). One of our graduates, however, biblioblogger Ken Ristau, was also interviewed and quoted in the article.

Later this week Taylor University College will be hosting Dr. Merold Westphal, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York. On Thursday night (Thursday 27 October 2005 – 7:30 pm) Dr. Westphal will be presenting a free public lecture entitled, “Religious Uses of Secular Postmodernism: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith.” This lecture will take a closer look at this perceived threat and uncover how many aspects of secular postmodernism are actually useful in proclaiming the Christian faith.

Dr. Westphal has written much on the relationship between postmodernism (broadly defined) and the Christian faith. While many Christians see postmodernism as a threat to the faith, Westphal (rightly) sees in postmodernism many ideas that are compatible with the Christian faith. Moreover, it isn’t as if philosophical modernity has been a friend to the faith, with its emphasis on the autonomy of the human knower and epistomological certitude. In contrast, postmodernism reminds us of the limits of human knowledge and human sinfulness. In some ways, postmodernism’s unintended commentary is on the doctrine of the fall.

Some of Westphal’s works include:

• Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith. Fordham University Press, 2001. Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com
• Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought. Indiana University Press, 1999. Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com
• Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul. Indiana University Press, 2004. Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com

I will be posting an MP3 of the talk on Taylor’s Public Lecture website.

Matt Page, the Resource Centre Manger at the Open Heaven Church in Loughborough, U.K., has put together an excellent little survey of films based on the biblical book of Genesis. It covers everything from the first silent film based on the book of Genesis (Joseph vendu par ses frères [Joseph Sold by his Brothers], directed by Vincent Lorant-Heilbronn in 1904) to more recent straight-to-video productions.

One film that I was unaware of — and based on Matt’s brief review is well worth a gander — is La Genèse, directed Cheick Oumar Sissoko (1999; Buy from Amazon.ca: VHS or DVD | Buy from Amazon.com: VHS or DVD). According to Matt, Sissoko’s film tells the story of Abraham’s family from an African perspective (it is even filmed in the Bambara language of Mali, spoken by only few million worldwide) and as a result it does a great job portraying the nomadic tribal context in which the biblical story of Jacob and Esau is set. Sounds facinating; I have already put a hold on it from our local library and I’ll post my review as soon as I have viewed it.

For an exhaustive listing of films based on the Hebrew Bible, see my The Old Testament on Film pages.

The New York Times Book section has a review of Robert Pinsky’s book, The Life of David (Nextbook/Schocken, 2005; Buy from Amazon.ca | Buy from Amazon.com).

The book is the first in Schocken’s Jewish Encounters series which will feature popular books on different Jewish themes. Here is an excerpt from William Deresiewicz’s review:

The Life of David grows increasingly strong as it moves from David’s early years to the years of his reign. The evolution from disconnected legends like David’s battle with Goliath to the fuller record of a sitting king allows Pinsky to move from the waters of speculation to the solid ground of interpretation. Pinsky’s reading of David’s mystifyingly disastrous attempt to take a census as the embodiment of everything threatening about his revolutionary transformation of the Jewish people “from a masked, uncataloged, exclusionary, taboo-ridden culture of tribes to a visible, enumerated, inclusive civilization,” is a tour de force of historical imagining.

Most important, Pinsky achieves his stated goal of making David more accessible without making him cease to be alien, as any figure from so remote a culture must always remain. Some might argue that a work of this kind ought not be attempted in the first place, that to embroider the biblical text is false and presumptuous. But what Pinsky does here is squarely within the Midrashic tradition of narrative elaboration, even if his methods and sensibility are unmistakably modern. Whatever may be said of David and his lineage, it is this kind of creative engagement that makes the Bible itself live and endure.

It sounds like it would be a good read.

Loren Rosson III discovered today that his blog is worthless! (I’ve suspected as much for some time! 😉

As it turns out, my blog is also worthless! Bummer… I guess I’ll keep my day job! At least I can console myself that I am not alone in my misery!

There are a number of Edmonton area academic events relating to religious studies coming up this fall that I am either involved in or have caught my interest. If you are in the Edmonton area, you may want to catch one or all of these events:

1. University of Alberta Human Rights Lecture (Wednesday 26 October 2005)

Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, will deliver the University of Alberta Visiting Lectureship in Human Rights on Wednesday October 26, 2005 at 7:30 pm in the University of Alberta’s Myer Horowitz Theatre. Khan will be the eighth speaker in the annual U of A Visiting Lectureship in Human Rights. Established in 1998, the lectureship has brought many leading human rights advocates to campus, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize recipient Shirin Ebadi. Tickets for the lecture are $10 and available through Ticketmaster. For more information go here.

2. Taylor University College Public Lecture on Postmodernity (Thursday 27 October 2005)

Next Thursday night, Dr. Merold Westphal, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Fordham University, New York, will be presenting a public lecture entitled, “Religious Uses of Secular Postmodernism: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith” (7:30-9:00 pm). Many Christians see postmodernism as a threat to their faith. This lecture will take a closer look at this perceived threat and uncover how many aspects of secular postmodernism are actually useful in proclaiming the Christian faith. The lecture is free and will be held in Stencel Hall, in the Taylor Seminary Building, 11525-23 Avenue (access from the West parking lot off 23 Avenue). For more information, including promotional materials, please go online here or contact me at your convenience.

3. University of Alberta Lectures on “Rethinking Religion”

The Program in Religious Studies and the Department of English and Film Studies are sponsoring a series of four lectures by Garry Watson, Professor of English, University of Alberta, on the topic “Rethinking Religion and Where We Stand in Relation to It.” The lectures will be delivered in Humanities Centre L-4 at 3:00 pm on Oct. 31 and Nov. 2, 7, and 9, with a reception following the final lecture on the 9th. For more information, check out the U of A Religious Studies website here.

4. Taylor University College Public Lecture on C.S. Lewis (Thursday 10 November 2005)

The fourth and final installment of the 2005 Taylor Public Lectures on Religion & Culture will be presented by Dr. Martin Friedrich, Associate Professor of English, Taylor University College. C.S. Lewis once said that his task as a writer was to get past the “watchful dragons” of his readers. In his lecture entitled, “Past Watchful Dragons: Christianity in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” Dr. Friedrich will examine the literary techniques that Lewis employed to get past those watchful dragons and to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. The lecture is free and will be held in Stencel Hall, in the Taylor Seminary Building, 11525-23 Avenue (access from the West parking lot off 23 Avenue). For more information, including promotional materials, please go online here or contact me at your convenience.

5. Association for Research in Religious Studies and Theology Annual General Meeting (Saturday 26 November 2005)

The Religion & Theology Department at Taylor University College will be hosting the Annual General Meeting of the Association for Research in Religious Studies and Theology. This year’s theme is “Magic, Demons and Healing: Light from Aboriginal Religions on the Gospels.” The meeting begins with registration at 8:30 am and will be finished by 2:00 pm. Registration is $20.00 (students/seniors $10.00). Registration includes coffee, snacks, and lunch, which will be catered by Nak for Catering. The meeting will be held in classroom S1 in the Taylor Seminary building. For more information, please see my Edmonton Area Academic Events Calendar here.

I hope I won’t regret this post indicating that I hope to be back on track in regards to my blogging! We have settled into our new abode to a degree that I hope I can actually get some other work done besides house-related work! I have run the ethernet lines for my office and my wife’s computer; I have installed the new washer and dryer and plumbed in the laundry sink so that we can have clean clothes; I have disposed of the myriad of boxes that have been littered throughout our house. My home office still needs some work, though the essentials are unpacked and set up.

There have been a number of interesting “discussions” in the biblio-blogosphere of late that I have wanted to post on; perhaps now I will have the chance!

At the May 2005 meeting of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies / Société canadienne des Études bibliques (CSBS/SCÉB) in London, ON, the membership approved a three-year renewable seminar on ancient historiography. The Ancient Historiography Seminar / Conférence antique d’historiographie is a professional, academic working group of the CSBS. Its purpose is to advance the study of ancient historiography within the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies and the broader biblical studies and ancient Near Eastern studies communities. This encompasses issues relating to the form and function of ancient historiographic texts, comparative historiography of the ancient world, methodological problems related to employing ancient historiographic texts for modern historical reconstruction, as well as various themes and tropes in biblical and cognate historiography. While certainly not limited to biblical texts, the Seminar will bring comparative material to bear on the understanding of the historiographic texts of the Bible.

Seminar Steering Committee

The Seminar is chaired by fellow biblioblogger Ken Ristau and the Steering Committee is made up of the following:

• Patricia G. Kirkpatrick, Associate Professor and Chair, Biblical Area, Faculty of Religious Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec.
• Gary Knoppers, Professor and Department Head, Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania.
• Dilys N. Patterson, Assistant Professor, Department of Religion, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.
• Ken Ristau (Seminar Chair), Doctoral student, Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania.
• Tyler F. Williams (Communication Officer), Assistant Professor and Chair, Religion & Theology Department, Taylor University College, Edmonton, Alberta.
• Ehud Ben Zvi, Professor, Department of History and Classics & Interdisciplinary Program of Religious Studies, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta.

Seminar Website

One of my tasks as a member of the Steering Committee, was to develop a Seminar website, which is now online at http://biblical-studies.ca/historiography. The website will allow the Seminar members to communicate with each other and with the broader academic community. It will also serve as a means to disseminate information about the Seminar and resources for the study of historiographic writings of the ancient Near Eastern world. You will note that the resources page is still under construction. If you have any resources that you think should be included on this page, please let me know.

York 2006 Call for Papers

The CSBS will be meeting at York University in Toronto in May 2006. The Call for Papers for the Seminar is available here. The theme for the Seminar’Â’s inaugural year is “The Function of Biblical and Cognate Historiography.” We invite papers that examine biblical and cognate historiography within its historical contexts. It is important that submissions remain strictly focused on the biblical and cognate historiography of antiquity (pre-1st century C.E.) and analyze its function for the communities that wrote and/or received these texts in the ancient world. Papers can be methodological or practical, that is, in the latter case, scholars may apply a particular critical approach to a problem or text(s) and so engage the questions implicitly rather than explicitly. Contributors must be or become members of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies. For more information on the call for papers, please see the Seminar website.

For questions regarding the Seminar please contact Ken Ristau (email: ken.ristau [at] anduril.ca). Questions and/or comments on this website may be forwarded to Tyler F. Williams (email: historiography [at] biblical-studies.ca).

The Review of Biblical Literature for this week is a bit sparse, though there are some noteworthy books under review. Based on the positive review, David Carr’s work looks quite facinating. From a comparative study of the educational curriculum of several ancient Near Eastern societies, Carr argues that rather than understand the production of Israelite Scripture being the result of editorial activity on actual manuscripts (e.g., documentary hypothesis), it is the result of “the ability of the erudite scribes to recite from memory long passages from the authoritative curriculum and to use them as templates in the composition of new texts.” I quite liked Carr’s Reading the Fractures of Genesis: Historical and Literary Approaches (WJK, 1996), and it appears this work is worthy of perusal. For those intersted in a more synchronic analysis of the Hebrew Bible, then David Dorsey’s book is for you. Dorsey performs a comprehensive examination of the books of the Hebrew Bible looking for literary connections and patterns (especially pivot patterns or palistrophes). Shapira’s rant review brings up some interesting points, perhaps the most important is the general lack of awareness on the part of English scholars of research written in modern Hebrew. While I agree that there are many excellent works on the Hebrew Bible being published in modern Hebrew by Israeli scholars, it is quite difficult to access many of them in North America (at least Canada). That being so, the fact that Dorsey missed a recent work expressly devoted to pivot patterns in the Hebrew Bible just because it was written in modern Hebrew is unfortuant to say the least. Finally, the collection of essays edited by Marguerat includes what looks like some interesting essays that relate to ancient Israelite historiography.

• David M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature. Reviewed by Itamar Singe
• David A. Dorsey, The Literary Structure of the Old Testament: A Commentary on Genesis-Malachi. Reviewed by Amnon Shapira
• John Eaton, Meditating on the Psalms. Reviewed by Gerald Wilson
• Rex Mason, Micah, Nahum and Obadiah (T and T Clark Study Guides; previously Shefffield Guides). Reviewed by Julia O’Brien
• Daniel Marguerat, ed., La Bible en récits: L’exégese biblique a l’heure du lecteur. Reviewed by Jean-Francois Racine [in French]
• Frank Anthony Spina, The Faith of the Outsider: Exclusion and Inclusion in the Biblical Story. Reviewed by Thomas Kraus

Today was Canadian Thanksgiving. Besides getting together with my extended family, I was working hard painting our duplex and getting it ready for renters (As I have posted, we have just moved into a new house. We are keeping our old duplex as a rental property).

During my solitude (just me and my paint) I was reflecting on thanksgiving and what I am thankful to God for — and I have much to be thankful for. I have a beautiful supportive wife who has stuck with me for 17 years (despite my own faults which outnumber hers by far!). I also have three wonderful children who I am very, very proud of. I have a great extended family, a wonderful house, a fulfilling teaching position, and much much more.

I couldn’t help feeling a bit guilty thinking about how very much I have considering how many people around the world are in such need (especially thinking of Pakistan, and the places affected by Katrina and the Tsunami). I find that the key things to remember is that (1) there is nothing I have done to deserve my blessings; and (2) to those who have been given much, much will be required.

I only hope that I may be faithful with all I have been blessed with.