Better Bibles Blog

The proposal to start thinking about inerrancy, or something akin to inerrancy, in terms of the linguists’ notion of felicity seems to have generated a bit of a buzz. I had wanted to post on belief vs. trust next, but the comment threads seem to demand a deeper delving into what felicity is. So here [...]

After several weeks of blog chatter about the firing of a professor at Westminster over his book on inerrancy, a metadebate has broken out between Alan Lenzi, who calls for a moratorium on the topic, and John Hobbins, who says that’s not a real option. Emotionally, I’m with Alan on this. I’d rather not talk [...]

This weekend I went to a wedding in Kingsburg, CA. That’s about 180 miles from my home in Castro Valley. The couple met at Berkeley Covenant Church. She’s an MK from Colombia and a recent Berkeley grad. Born in Kingsburg, she grew up in Medellín where her father has been a Covenant missionary for over [...]

This semester I’m co-teaching a seminar (actually a practicum) on lexicography for endangered languages. Twenty some odd years ago I published an extensive dictionary of the Ottawa and Eastern dialects of Ojibwe (a.k.a. Chippewa). It’s what got me my job here at Berkeley. In this seminar we talk a lot about what dictionaries are supposed [...]

This past weekend was the board retreat. We’ve just called our interim pastor to be our senior pastor and he’s interested in leading a church that doesn’t burn its leaders out. To that end he had us read The Emotionally Healthy Church by Peter Scazzero. I read it. Then I lay on the floor and [...]