Around the blogs: missional hermeneutics, short-term missions, exegesis, and new digs for 2 friends

[Mostly from the weeks I was gone; otherwise see the “Links of the Day” in the right-hand column.]

New Google Search for bible blogs:

The Fundamental problem with conservative reformed theology (Kirk)

1. The Universe (law and the deeper magic);
2. Ethics
3. Atonement
4. What did Jesus Do?: Why the conservative Reformed first loved, then came to despise NT Wright.

Michael Gorman: Missional Hermeneutics:

Rethinking Short Term Missions (Desiring God.) – very short posts

• Rethinking Short-Term Missions
• The Effect of Short-Term Missions on Poverty
• We Need Them at Least as Much as They Need Us
• Teaching as a Short-Term Missions Strategy
• The Importance of Doing Missions as Servants

They include a link to this important article: Livermore – American or American’t – A critical analysis of western training ot the world – EMQ 20 Jan 2004 (pdf).

I’d think every American Christian coming to Africa to do a training or seminar will need to read this:

. . . some of the key findings generated from a study I conducted comparing North American pastors descriptions of their experiences training cross-culturally with the way national pastors and leaders described those same experiences.

AKMA on Exegesis (to be turned into a comic book): One: What’s so hard about exegesis?, Two: More about Exegesis, Three, Four

FRIENDS on the MOVE:

Lingamish (David Ker)

Doug Chaplin’s new blog home: Clayboy

I intend to keep a principal focus around questions of how we read, understand and interpret (Christian) Scripture in a very different world and culture from the one(s) it was written in. Experience tells me that I will inevitably wander a long way from that in some posts, but I expect it will still be at the heart of this blog. My profound scepticism about the ways our media report stories, especially about religion, science, health and politics (and their interactions) may also colour and shape a number of posts.

Churchgoers are nicer people, better citizens (Putnam via Gerson)

Against the expectations of hard-core secularists, Putnam asserts, “religious Americans are nicer, happier, and better citizens.” They are more generous with their time and money, not only in giving to religious causes but to secular ones. They join more voluntary associations, attend more public meetings, even let people cut in line in front of them more readily. Religious Americans are three to four times more socially engaged than the unaffiliated. Ned Flanders is a better neighbor.

The new student strategy:

Turn in a corrupted electronic file (available online for around $5), and by the time the professor notices (must have happened while you were e-mailing), you’ve had time to finish the real paper. Chris Heard points to an Inside Higher Ed report on Corrupted-Files.com (including an interesting interview with 25year old owner of the site is). Heard gives suggestions for combatting this practice.

In one of the comments to Heard’s post, Art Boulet describes a creative cheating scam at Harvard: (students printed out answers to exams in tiny fonts and put them on the back of water bottle labels so they could read the fonts magnified through the water bottle). Fit’s with what the site owner’s interview says.

“I guess the more perfect people think you are, the more likely in life you are to cheat to keep that perception.”

NEWS:

Liberia’s war criminal Charles Taylor embraces Judaism (BBC Interview with Taylor’s wife)