Chosen? by Walter Brueggemann
Are the people of 21st-century Israel the chosen ones of Genesis to whom Yahweh promised the land in eternal covenant? Walter Brueggemann gives a nuanced answer.
Revelation
Can I Get a Witness? Reading Revelation through African American Culture, by Brian K. Blount. Would John of Patmos use rap music if he were to give a spiritual critique of empire today?...
Apocalyptic visions
Elaine Pagels's book repeats a winning formula: contrast the canon's controversial parts with more appealing Gnostic selections.
Gospel journey
With his imagination in overdrive, Bruce Fisk has created a fictional character to guide readers through the Holy Land and the thickets of New Testament scholarship.
Among the misfits
If Jesus and his improbable band of followers loitered in the town square today or showed up at church, what reception would they receiv...
Pilgrims in the Kingdom: Travels in Christian Britain
From Columba at Iona to Evelyn Underhill at Pleshey, British men and women of past generations yearned to know God and follo...
Here be dragons: Acts 11:1-18; Psalm 148; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35
Medieval mapmakers, with their limited knowledge of distant lands and uncharted seas, sometimes depicted dragons on the far edges of their maps. Hic sunt dracones (“Here be dragons!”), they warned. Dragons do not appear on our modern maps. But bodies on the rail lines of Madrid and the streets of Fallujah leave no doubt that Something Ferocious stalks the edges of our political and religious maps. Nationalism, tribalism, empire and religion mutate in draconian forms, and we sometimes fail to recognize the beastly genes in our own DNA.
System failure: Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5
"A virus breached the campus computer network last week and the entire system crashed. Repair has been difficult, but I bring a word of hope.” The director of information technology at the college where I was about to lecture on eschatology added, “This has been frustrating for everyone. Files have been corrupted and programs do not run properly. Please be patient. Some files have been restored. . . . Any day now we will be back to full operation.”