Books: What I'm Reading

Rather than a book review this time, I would like to hit a rundown of some of the things I am currently reading. I would not automatically endorse everything in all of these...but they should be useful reading anyway!

Fiction:

1. I'm rereading Timothy Zahn's Thrawn and Thrawn: Ascendancy trilogies during wind-down time in the evening. It's a good relaxation moment.

2. Before that I read the Michael Crichton/James Patterson work Eruption. It's not as awesome as Jurassic Park, but it's still good :)

Non-Fiction Devotional:

1. I'm working through Dallas Willard's Renovation of the Heart and the accompanying work by Jan Johnson Renovation of the Heart in Daily Practice. Thought-provoking.

2. Ryan Holiday's latest in the Stoic Virtues series: Right Thing, Right Now. I like this series, even though I might not always agree with all of Holiday's philosophical ideas, this is a good series.

3. Jesus Every Day: A Journey through the Bible in One Year by Mary DeMuth, which is a great opener with a short Bible passage and devotional.

Non-Fiction Learning:

1. The Battle of Brandy Station which is about the largest cavalry battle in North America. It occurred in the Civil War, shortly before the Battle of Gettysburg. It's by Eric J. Wittenberg, who also wrote a good book about John Buford during Gettysburg.

2. Ownership: The Evangelical Legacy of Slavery in Edwards, Wesley, and Whitfield by Sean McGever. Why? because.

That's the current spread of reading outside of the dissertation work.

Doug

Sermon Recap for June 23 2024

 Good afternoon!

It's time for the sermon recap for yesterday. The morning sermon was the last one in our series on Acts. We've wrapped up that one and we're moving on to 1 Samuel next week.

Historical Thinking for June 18 2024

 So, one of the things that has me struggling with blogging for the last, oh, 3 or 4 years is that I am supposed to be writing a dissertation. I feel bad to blog when I should write for assignments. Except these days the dissertation is a bit stymied. It’s not so much writer’s block as it is…doldrums. I’m just stating and restating the same things and that is getting me nowhere. I’m also now past the deadline/time-limit and living on appeal.

But one lesson learned from the mechanical world is that sometimes, one must prime the pump. You have to put in a little bit to get a lot out, and since the blog is worth exactly what you are paying for it, I decided it’s a good place to write with a little less formality. Hopefully that gets my brain going to get the other, “proper” writing going. It’s not that I intend to be less precise or spell worse—if I represent something as factual, I intend to show where I got that fact from.

Academic history writing, though, is expected to be dispassionate, third-person, non-prescriptive, and generally lacking in empathy or judgment. As I write about racism and misogyny in late nineteenth century America, I’m not supposed to sound agitated by the people who cloaked that in religious language. 

Except I’m quite agitated by it. It was wrong. It remains wrong that we have never really corrected for the embedding of these attitudes in many of our religious systems to this day. There’s just some agitation to be shared.

Although I do not want to only rant here, but I do want to have a way to talk about where we have been and how that, in turn, drives certain emotional responses. It is good and right and fitting to have emotional responses to history. 

Which is the main point for Historical Thinking today: it is not only acceptable to have feelings about the past, it is right and fitting to have feelings about the past. In the course of those feelings, you cannot ignore the facts or be unwilling to learn new ones. There may be a whole new set of emotional responses to deal with after learning new facts, but thtat is just the way it goes sometimes.

You see, history is not just the facts of what has happened, it is more accurately our understanding of the facts. Not just whether or not the United States declared independence from England, but why they did, when they did, and what difference it made. And our emotional response is part of that. The facts—like the approval of the Declaration of Independence on July 2, 1776, or the final end of the Revolutionary War (which started in 1775) in 1783—are part of that understanding. Neither fact should affect an American’s emotional attachment to July 4th as our Independence Day. It’s the mutually-agreed upon celebration of all those facts at once.

Most weeks, then, I’ll post a bit of something about the past and how we think about the past. Maybe it will be something that provokes some thought. Maybe it will be something that you find boring. All of it will be from things I have learned or am learning in working in history.

Book: Matthew through Old Testament Eyes

 

In the ever-growing intermittency of my blog writing, I have another book to talk about today. It is Matthew through Old Testament Eyes, the next entry in the Through Old Testament Eyes commentary series. Which, hopefully, will end up encompassing most of the New Testament. I would not expect OT commentaries, although a "Pentateuch through Post-Exilic Eyes" type of commentary might be intriguing.

First, the series: the idea here is to examine specifically how Old Testament thoughts informed the writing of portions of the New Testament. Not merely the "big idea" concept of "There is a God, He made the world," but rather the finer details like how the Beatitudes are informed by passages like Psalm 1. There are entries, so far, on the Gospels of John and Mark, and on the book of Revelation. (No, it's not "Revelations" through Old Testament Eyes, either. It's always singular.)

This entry to the series is on the Gospel of Matthew, and therefore draws the appropriate name of Matthew through Old Testament Eyes. It is a paperback, 390 pages, published by Kregel Academic with a list price of around $31. Endorsement blurbs include Lynn Cohick from Houston Theological Seminary and Michael F. Bird from Ridley College.

David Capes, author, is the Executive Director of the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, a place that my daughters have been to but I have not. I will try not to hold that jealousy against him in this review. He holds a PhD from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary nad been involved in many scholarly works on the New Testament in his thirty-plus years of academic work.

On to the content: 

This is a generally academic commentary, more fit for the in-depth study of Scripture than for basic devotional use. It is not a deeply technical one requiring knowledge of Greek or Hebrew (the Hebrew would be relevant because of the OT references). It is broken down by sections of Matthew, with some areas detailing verse-by-verse but usually covering a couple of verses per comment. 

As an example, the commentary on Matthew 18:21-22 caught my attention. Most Christians are familiar with Peter's question about how many times he should forgive his brother--it even made one of the earlier VeggieTales episodes--and we have sermons on it, debates about it. It was not until this commentary that I even considered a connection to Genesis 4:23-24 about Lamech's boast. 

This is a good insight. And representative of the types of help this commentary will bring. The introductory material, covering background, etc., of Matthew is brief. It will hit the highlights but if you are needing details on authorship debates, date of writing, etc., you will need an additional source.

In all, this is a good addition to the Matthew shelf. This will broaden your understanding of how Matthew's original audience heard what he said.

Sermon Recap for June 16 2024

 Good Monday!

Here is yesterday's sermon. Video and audio. One more sermon in Acts, then it's time to move elsewhere in the text.

Sermon Recap for June 9 2024

 Good morning!

Here is yesterday's sermon from Mt. Olive Baptist Church

Sermon Recap for June 2 2024

 Good morning!

This week, there's just the one sermon :)

Steven preached his second sermon at Mt. Olive, Crossett, and had the joy of preaching a second week in a row after last week. Here he is: