Tree!
My father, brother and sister-in-law, and I had the delight of visiting one of the prettiest places on the planet last month, Maui, all of us celebrating milestone birthdays and anniversaries.
We hung around and shopped and ate quite a bit in West Maui, in Lahaina. Lā hainā, in Hawaiian, means “cruel sun.”
Maybe it was because of the “cruel sun” that William Owen Smith (1848–1929), a lawyer from a family of American missionaries, planted a banyan tree on April
Moving!
Another moving story (in more ways than one!).
After thirteen or so years, my brother’s job is moving him from South Carolina. Finally, they’ve come to their senses and decided to relocate to Texas.
Moves are tough.
(As a single person who has had to sever his closest ties with each move—and I’ve made a few myself—I can vouch for that. Moves are tough, indeed.)
Yup, moves are tough. No, you don’t lose your friends. No, it’s not that you will never ever go back
Preaching is Theological
Nehemiah’s narrative describes the assembly of God’s people who had returned from exile; in the assembly the word of God was read and made clear so that they might renew their covenant with their God. In previous blogs I’ve noted how this paradigmatic gathering undergirds many of our assumptions about preaching. Here’s another implication of Nehemiah’s account: preaching is a theological activity of a special kind.
All the people
Friend!
This was his last faculty engagement at Dallas Theological Seminary—its commencement exercises that were conducted a couple of weeks ago.
He’s moving on to greener pastures.
(Though the extent of greenness outside Dallas Seminary is debatable!)
John Hilber, erstwhile tenured Associate Professor of Old Testament Studies at DTS, is moving on. He’s taking up a professoriate at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary. By now, he and his wife, Charlotte, will have arrived there—truck,
Model!
It is always hard to model and study social interactions and the effects these interactions have on our behavior. But one researcher with the National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA, attempted to do just that. Bruce Sacerdote studied peer effects in a setting where peers are randomly assigned: entering freshmen in Dartmouth College are randomly assigned dorms and roommates. In one smooth stroke, Sacerdote eliminated the self-selection bias by which roommates
Preaching is Biblical
In the account in Nehemiah, of the post-exilic gathering of God’s people to renew their covenant with Yahweh, there is no question that the Word of God is given prominence. Preaching is to be biblical: there is this one book that must be preached in the assembly of the people of God. No more. No less.
And all the people gathered as one …, and they asked Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses which the LORD had given to
Union?
Yet another interesting development from this strange world that is occupied by some strange people (which, needless to say, includes strange you and strange me).
Seattle. December 2011. An abandoned warehouse was scheduled to be demolished to make space for a new construction, an apartment complex.
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.