Daily Gleanings (23 May 2019)

Reading time: < 1 minutes

On theLAB, Dougald Mclaurin discusses how faculty can “work with librarians to help students write better papers.”

Similarly, see also these prior discussions about how to use your school’s library or other libraries near you.


From Brill:

With the publication of Keeping Watch in Babylon, Brill is happy to have published the 100th volume of the series Culture and History of the Ancient Near East.

To celebrate, we are offering a selection of free articles from some of the most successful volumes in the series. Access to these articles will remain free until July 31st, 2019.

The openly available articles are listed on the announcement page.

HT: AWOL

Daily Gleanings (17 May 2019)

Reading time: < 1 minutes

Peter Gurry and John Meade discuss Phoenix Seminary’s “Text and Canon Institute.”


Freedom discusses how to improve work performance by minimizing distractions.

The essay is pitched mostly toward employers or those in supervisory roles. But we biblical scholars often work in some ways as our own self-supervisors. So the essay should translate over fairly easily to be helpful even for those of us who don’t have direct reports.

Moltmann and Ricoeur in Dialog

Reading time: < 1 minutes

At the Logos Academic Blog, Stephen Chan has a substantive essay on interaction between Jürgen Moltmann and Paul Ricoeur that focuses on the centrality of hope to Christian eschatology. In part, Chan suggests:

If symbols do give rise to thought … , then the symbolic language of biblical apocalyptic literature is irreducible and too important to be left behind in our theological construction.

For the full essay, see Chan’s original post at theLAB.

A primer for Barth’s “Church Dogmatics”

Reading time: < 1 minutes

At the Logos Academic Blog,  Charles Helmer offers five areas of suggestions to help ease readers’ paths into Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. As an overarching suggestion, Helmer recommends,

Armed with the following tips and a healthy dose of Spirit-inspired courage, the theologian can do no better than to sit down with one of Barth’s volumes, crack it open, and get to the hard yet rewarding work of reading.

For Helmer’s full discussion, see his original post at theLAB.

Primary literature reading schedule

Reading time: < 1 minutes

Over at the Logos Academic Blog, Shawn Wilhite has posted a detailed discussion of the primary literature reading schedule he’s been maintaining. Something of this nature, tailored to particular personal interests, commitments, etc. is certainly a worthwhile discipline to develop, and Wilhite’s post provides some good grist for the mills of those who may want to think about starting a similar plan of their own.

Bates, Abraham, and allegiance in the gospel

Reading time: < 1 minutes

At the Logos Academic Blog, Tavis Bohlinger has part 4 in his interview series with Matthew Bates about Bates’s recently released Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Baker, 2017). Bates comments, in part,

My preference for “allegiance” springs from the conviction that the proclaimed gospel centered on Jesus the royal messiah, and this suggests that the “allegiance” portion of the range of meaning of pistis is in play in some crucial New Testament texts pertaining to salvation…. It is extremely unlikely that Paul felt that pistis was something that was ultimately in tension with or contradictory to embodied activity (i.e., good works as a general category). Paul’s complaint with works (of Law) lies elsewhere, as I explain in Ch. 5.

For the balance of the interview, see the original post at theLAB. Apparently, I’d overlooked part 3 of the series, which is, of course, also available at the LAB. So, for prior discussion of the volume, see also Bates at theLAB, part 2Other discussion of Bates, “Salvation by allegiance”Bates interview at theLAB, and Bates, “Salvation by allegiance alone” and some theological forebears.