Category Archives: Literary Reading

Why Narrative Theology?

Within Protestantism (and more specifically Evangelicalism) there has been a tendency toward the abstractions of doctrinal confessions. Theology has most often tended toward bullet pointed statements of confession. While this has its place it fails to grapple with the revelation … Continue reading

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Lamenting Lamentations: A Literary-Theology

In teaching the book of Lamentations, I was (once again) struck by the structure of this little book in its Hebrew form. It seems by its very structure to shape the Hebrew reader/hearer. Of course, any reading of the text … Continue reading

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Literature for Ethics and Theology

“Literature is important for ethics because literature is as complicated as life itself, and cannot be decoded or boiled down. Ethical insight comes from reading it–first sequentially and then reflectively–not from trying to extract a ‘message’ from it.”* This is … Continue reading

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The Beauty of the Bible

The more I study the Scriptures, the more I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the Scriptures…and by the God who has inspired writers in their own day and culture to write with beauty. The deeper I dig, the more … Continue reading

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Who Do You Believe? Jean Valjean and the Amalekite

My wife and I went on a date (admittedly a rare occurrence with four children) to see Les Misérables. It was a wonderful (at times depressing) musical film adaptation of the classic book by Victor Hugo (which I have never … Continue reading

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The Beauty of the Book of Job

Ah…the beauty of the poetics of Job at last have been discovered and boiled down to the following helpful equation (courtesy of Robert Polzin, Biblical Structuralism, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977, p.75):   Fx(a) : Fy(b) ≅ Fx(b) : Fa – 1(y)  Aren’t … Continue reading

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