“The Horse Is Dead, Sir.” “Well, Beat It Some More.”
Faithlife just posted a blog interview they did with me about Authorized. Is there more to be said? Maybe a little! I got my first academic review of Authorized, and though I’m waiting to see if my response will be published in the same journal (the editor was amenable to this idea), I give a sneak peek of that response in this interview. Check it out!
Review: The ESV Preaching Bible
The new ESV Preaching Bible is another win for Crossway. They gave me a copy to review (no strings attached, of course—well, actually, there were two ribbons in the Bible for bookmarking, but they weren’t attached to any stipulations from Crossway, just to the supple binding…) This new Bible represents a few little tweaks to the format I’ve been using myself for preaching for the last four years, and they are genuine helps. Here’s what the Bible looks like on the inside. First prose: Now...
The ESV Scripture Journal: Old Testament Set
I was just at the Shepherds Conference representing Lexham Press; I stood all day in the book tent. I had many dozens of conversations with pastors from all over. I also saw/met dozens of graduates of my alma mater: my table was a bit of a pilgrimage site. (I also sold out of all 50 copies of Authorized, and received a great gift from the Lord: a number of stories about where my book has gone and what by God’s grace it has done.) I didn’t get to go to a single session, because the book tent...
Cheapening the Western Musical Tradition: Some Thoughts Inspired by Theodore Gioia and Andy Crouch
Theodore Gioia in the L.A. Review of Books: In the mass-media era, the general public primarily experiences classical music through detached snippets of larger pieces extracted to lend their symbolic power to a commercial agenda. Artists and advertisers dissect classical works into short melodies — quotable passages severed from their original context — assembling a menu of musical leitmotifs to bolster their message with a desired tone, mood, or association. Like artificial flavoring for the...
Wisdom from Peter Williams on Textual Criticism
Peter Williams is a treasure. These lectures contain some absolute gold, and they give me that lovely feeling of being right, of being validated by someone smarter than oneself. Indeed, some of his key points are things I have come to realize on my own—though he states them so much better, and he bases them on greater quantities of nerdy gumshoeing in primary sources. (For example, he went digging in Erasmus’ Annotations in order to show that he was aware of a huge number of textual variants...