Catching up

I have not posted in quite some time. We have been very busy! We had a nice trip to Dallas a couple of weeks ago. I needed the break! We got back into town and I spent the next day painting – from 9am to 9pm. If you know me, you know that was a miserable day! But, I did an ok job. Luckily Tiffany was able to clean up any messes. That was a Tuesday, I was in the office on Wednesday preparing for Bible Study and Thursday preparing for Sunday. That Friday I proctored a test for my father at UNA. Friday night we had a Halloween party and Saturday we moved pews at the church building (you would think that I had killed members of people’s families). Last week we (hopefully) got back into our normal routine. We are also working on potty training our son – yay!

In the world of Biblical studies – well, as far as I am concerned…

The NAC commentary on Mark by Brooks is an excellent commentary. I am currently reading through it and loving it. The Gospel of Mark is an amazing yet under-appreciated book.

I recently posted a book review for How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth. I also read A User’s Guide to Bible Translations by Dewey. If I were recommending one of these two books, it would definitely be Dewey’s! It is easier to read with less bias.

Hopefully I can begin posting regularly again!

 

Odds and Ends

I stumbled across a blog that led to another blog that led to another blog which had a strange “picture” on it. The picture was a word cloud. For those of you who may not know a “word cloud” is a collection of the main words in a piece of literature or the categories of website (or blog) and the size of these words depends on the frequency of the word. I have a “category cloud” on the side of this blog. The category that I blog under the most is the biggest (though I often fail to categorize all of my posts). So I went to the website that this picture came from and I saw the most amazing posters! The artist/designer had created word clouds for each book of the Bible. I am fascinated by these things and I plan on purchasing some in the near future. Take a look – http://identity33.com/66clouds.html – This link will take you to the home page and you can select from the Old or New Testaments. Then you can either select the book you want to look at or just scroll through all of them. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!

I have been reading How to Choose a Translation for All Its Worth by Mark L Strauss and A User’s Guide to Bible Translations by David Dewey. I will post reviews for both books soon. I have been doing a Sunday night series on Bible Translations. So many people use a specific translation and don’t even know why. So we have been looking at translation philosophy (formal equivalence or dynamic equivalence), difficulties in translations, and we will finish up by looking at the subject of manuscripts and a brief introduction to the main versions that people are using today (i.e. KJV, NKJV, NASB, ESV, NIV, etc.).

I stay pretty busy. I just finished my MBA and as soon as I was done with that I began to relearn Greek and to work on two articles for DeWard Publishing. This is all in addition to my normal teaching/preaching schedule. Not to mention my most important duties to God, my wife, and my son! Sometimes I wear this busy schedule as a “badge of honor” of sorts. And then Gary Henry tells me to slow down – Thanks Brother Henry! You always say just the right thing!