Archive for June, 2009

Julia M O’Brien is an Old Testament scholar whose blog looks at the Bible and culture. She has a series on why one should bother reading the Old Testament. She says reading it will give you background about Christianity and lots of themes in art, music and literature and different ways of thinking about God, access to some big ideas and great stories.  There are lots of other things on her blog as well.  Another place worth visiting on the internet.

I just found a blog written by Timo S. Paananen, a Finnish Evangelical Lutheran doctoral candidate. It’s called Salainen evankelista (the name means “Secret Evangelist” in English)  and he says that it “will feature discussion of early christianity, extra-canonical early Christian writings and the New Testament, and contemporary conspiracy theories, most probably in reverse order of importance”. Some posts are written in Finnish with an English summary, others entirely in English. I so wish that I wrote in my second language as well ans Timo does in English!!!

The two posts that caught my attention are the beginning of a series on a lecture by American Richard Schusterman given in Helsinki on 8 June, and its followup. They talk about the place of intelligent questions in contemporary Christianity.  I’ve subscribed to the feed so I don’t miss the next one. I have no intention of attempting a summary, but two sentences that I resounded with in his second post are:

From the [church] tradition we will have to pick out consciously those strands that support life, freedom and unity and discard those strands that oppose them. If we don’t do the cherry-picking this way, it will nonetheless get to be done and the consequences could be worse for humanity in general.

Well worth a visit.  Even if you are supposed to be studying.  Just bookmark it for some other time.