Sunday, February 19, 2012

My guest posts at the Western Seminary blog the next few weeks...

You may or may not already know that I graduated from Western Seminary with a Masters in Biblical Theology. It was a great experience and I learned a lot about the Bible, myself, and God during my time there and I am an enormous fan of the school and the staff there.

Recently, Marc Cortez (Western's Academic Dean and professor of theology and church history) asked if I would be willing to do a couple of guest posts for the new Western Seminary blog, Trans*Formed, and I gladly agreed. So, for the next few weeks, I'll be guest posting over there, sharing some new writing I've been working on, trying to create a new look at some familiar stories about Jesus.

Tonight my first, introductory post went up, about why I'm attempting a "translation" of Bible stories for today's audiences (especially those who are familiar with the Bible).

Here are the first couple of paragraphs...


I grew up in church, and frankly, I love it. I know that’s not cool right now, and I don’t care. Don’t worry, it will come back into style. 
One side effect of growing up in Christian culture can be a certain contemptuous familiarity with the Bible. I remember impatiently tapping my feet when we trotted out the Christmas story, begging for it to end so we could tear into the presents. I remember playing “Bible Trivial Pursuit” in sixth grade and thinking to myself, “I know everything there is to know about the Bible, except how to pronounce some of the names.” I knew all the answers because they had been provided for me, like an answer key at the back of the book (or, more likely, in the margins and footnotes). There weren’t questions I needed to wrestle with or even consider.


You can read the rest here. I'm disabling comments on this post so please leave comments on the Trans*Formed blog!