The Weeks in Review

1. It's been three weeks now since my mother passed. She lived a long, good life and her passing was peaceful. It's more just weird. This morning at 11 is a show she used to listen to called Tinyberg Tales. I won't be calling to ask how it went.

The readership of my reflections on her life was surprising. It helped to have some notes from her early years. I may combine them with the notes from my dad's life. Together their lives covered a century, 1924-2024. I don't expect a large audience of buyers. :-)

2. I've had a lot of success on YouTube with Hebrew, so I wrote a book that took the approach I had used at Wesley Seminary and presented it in book form. It goes with a Udemy course I created in parallel. I have only promoted it on YouTube because the women in ministry/leadership book has been doing well (for me) with Facebook advertising so I didn't want to taint that well. First real "success" I've had with Facebook advertising, although I'm only making a few dollars a day when all is said and done.

3. In early July I made my yearly trip to Silver Lake Camp to be the Bible teacher (alongside none other than A.J. Thomas). We went through the book of Acts this year. I'm convinced that my sense of Acts (and in fact many parts of the Bible) would be interesting to a lot of people if I could find the right way to present it. I've had this blog since 2004 and of course any number of people have engaged it, but it has not had a broad punch -- not when you think of the likes of Nijay Gupta or Michael Bird or James McGrath.

I did start a new project this morning (not another one!). I'm titling it, "As Told by the Women: The Story of the Bible." Most readers are women. I thought it might be interesting to write a novelized overview of the Bible using the voices of key women throughout as the narrators, so to speak. Fourteen chapters. On your mark, get set, go.

4. I do have a writing schedule, but most days I don't get much to it. Sundays, I've been working on a project relating to the book of Revelation. Mondays I'm writing some notes from my life. Tuesday is Science and Scripture, a course I teach for Houghton that starts in a week. Wednesday is how to study the Bible. Thursday is my philosophy. Friday is my family story. Saturday is math and science. Like I said, these projects languish on.

For reading, I got three books this week to read. Miranda Cruz's Faithful Politics is now out. Her book is going to do well. I also started Salman Khan's Brave New Words on how AI is going to impact education. Finally, I bought Brant Pitre's Jesus and Divine Christology. I expect I'll find it driven more by sentiment than objectivity like so many scholarly works seem to me these days.

5. I went to Oklahoma Baptist last week for a day trip. We may work on some new online courses with them. Working on finishing up the Church Leadership ordination course for Kingwood Learn. Kingswood Learn now has over 1000 learners on the platform. Five of the ordination core courses are there now (Intro to Theology, Inductive Bible Study, NT Survey, Wesleyan Church History, Theology of Holiness). You can watch and read them for free. You can pay $350 and get the credit toward ordination licensure. Or you can pay $900 and get 3 hours of academic credit.

Kingswood has been a superb partner with Campus. For example, my daughter is taking a college biology class through the partnership. I'm teaching an ethics class for a student at Cairn University through Kingswood. Their on-campus enrollment is currently small (hindered in no small part by the quotas the Canadian government abruptly imposed this year), but they train more Wesleyan ministers online than any of the Wesleyan schools.

6. Last weekend I blew through Brian Simmon's Passion Translation study notes on Luke. He's revising it because it was a little too much for Bible Gateway and they took it down, I think. He's trying to be a little more scrupulous in a revision. It is a fun paraphrase and I don't have any problem with them for several hermeneutical reasons. 

I have two main critiques as a scholar. First, he "word-fallacies" all over the place (etymology, overload...). Second, he follows the late Lamsa in thinking the Syriac is a direct line back to Jesus in Aramaic. Although he's a true believer, it's actually a great marketing device. You give readers the impression that you have a secret line to the real Jesus AND it lets you claim that all the verses and passages left out in modern translations are actually original. However, pretty much all scholars think that the Syriac is later.

Onward!