I had coffee with a student this afternoon. It helped crystallize for me one way in which seminary education can be dangerous. Note well: dangerous does not equal bad. But like many good and helpful things, it can be dangerous as well. The danger is simply this: seminary can teach us that people are ideas [...]
Theology is my friend. Theology is my friend. Theology is my friend. If I say it enough, I’m sure to believe it. And I know it’s true. I am a theological reader of scripture. Once upon a time I thought that what I loved was theology proper, but then I discovered that what I thought [...]
Something along those lines, “You can’t learn what you don’t already know,” was one point of an E. P. Sanders retrospective on his teaching career. (Anybody have the link for that? It was a talk he gave at Duke a year or so ago.) I discovered afresh this weekend that this is absolutely true. We [...]
