I've been reading War in Heaven, one of the seven novels written by Charles Williams, friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. (Amazon has several of these novels available in Kindle editions for just $3.19 apiece.)
Early in the book, Williams has one of the characters thinking that Christianity
"was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist."
I think there's some real insight in this observation. When we understand that we're living in a fallen world, we're not going to expect more from the world than it can realistically provide. At ths same time, we're not going to be overcome with despair at the extent of the brokenness of the world, because we know that God is carrying out his plan of restoring his good creation.
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amazon kindle, books
Posted at: 10:29 PM | 0 Comments | Add Comment | Permalink
I've finally finished my report on the lecture Walter Kaiser gave at Miami University back in March. (See the March 29 entry.) It was a very enjoyable project, but I got carried away. The print version of the article is 14 pages long, and there are 37 footnotes. Who is actually going to read this monstrosity?
In his lecture, Kaiser briefly mentioned some important archaeological finds from each period of biblical history. During the lecture I scratched down the list, with the idea that I would look up each one afterwards.
As it turned out, each discovery had its own interesting story. I made heavy use of my Biblical Archaeology Review CD-ROM. (It contains the first 27 years of the magazine.) Most of the discoveries in the list have received extensive coverage there. I also used
- Kaiser's A History of Israel: From the Bronze Age through the Jewish Wars and The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and Relevant?
- the survey articles on archaeology from the Expositor's Bible Commentary.
- a number of articles from the Associates for Biblical Research website.
- Articles from the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, the Bulletin for Biblical Research, Ancient Near East...
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apologetics, archaeology, walter kaiser
Posted at: 11:33 PM | 0 Comments | Add Comment | Permalink
