Ancient Wisdom Today » James Kugel http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org Ancient Wisdom Today: seeking to understand the past to make sense of the present Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:09:17 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 How to Read the Bible http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/08/12/how-to-read-the-bible/ http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/08/12/how-to-read-the-bible/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 23:49:03 +0000 Maer http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/?p=542 James Kugel intends his book How to Read the Bible to be a guide to, and a tour through, the Hebrew Bible. With over eight hundred pages, the book showcases most of what professor Kugel knows about the Bible—and that is a lot! It was a little daunting for me to get through book as I found it almost impossible not to stop here and there to digest its content and to get better acquainted with some ancient interpreter, or conversant with a particular hypothesis of biblical scholarship. This is what the book does: it shows you how the Hebrew Bible was interpreted in the past by both Jews and Christians, and how biblical scholars understand the meaning of the same biblical texts today. Kugel also has a website dedicated to the book worth checking out. And, if you want to know how the book is being received by the public at large, you will probably appreciate the article by David Plotz in the New York Times entitled Reading Is Believing, or Not.

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]]> http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/08/12/how-to-read-the-bible/feed/ 0 Inerrancy: A Very Different, Divine Sort of Thing http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/06/03/inerrancy-a-very-different-divine-sort-of-thing/ http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/2009/06/03/inerrancy-a-very-different-divine-sort-of-thing/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:34:47 +0000 Maer http://maer.vidanovaphilly.org/?p=473 One of the areas of theological reflection that I have been thinking about lately is the interface between what we think the Bible is and what it says it is. Evangelicals have come up with very clear formulations of what they think the Bible should be, or rather, what an inspired, authoritative book should look like. Inerrancy debates are looming up all over the place, and part of the debate is exactly about one’s presupposition of the nature of Scripture. Although “inerrancy battles” are mostly fought within evangelicalism, I have come to realize more and more that the assumptions that often fuel the epistemological, pre-suppositional and theological fire of these discussions are not privy to fundamentalists and a certain cross-section of evangelicals. The same question-begging assumptions come from the academia, and the presently raging debates are bringing these to light in more nuanced ways.

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