Another Translation Coming Soon

Another translation of the canonical and apocryphal books is soon to be completed by a diverse team of translators with the input of lay readers. The new translation will be known as the Common English Bible (CEB). Follow the link for a list of the translators and contributors here.

You Can't Take it With You

As Tall As Lions (ATAL) released their latest album, You Can't Take it With You, August 18, 2009, with Triple Crown Recordings. Check out the full album online here. ATAL will be in Minneapolis, MN, at First Avenue on Saturday, October 17, 2009.

Life is For Living

Lyrics | Coldplay lyrics - Life Is For Living lyrics

Everything's Not Lost

Lyrics | Coldplay lyrics - Everything's Not Lost lyrics

The Blues

Lyrics | Switchfoot lyrics - The Blues lyrics

Poets Prophets Preachers

http://robbell.com/poets-prophets-preachers/

Dr. Norman Habel

Question to ponder:

Is Genesis 1 about "domination?"

Eating Mercifully

"Tragic Error"

"The earth is the Lord's, we gabbed,
and the fullness thereof-
while we looted and pillaged, claiming indemnity:
the fullness thereof
given over to us, to our use-
while we preened ourselves, sure of our power,
wilful or ignorant, through the centuries.

Miswritten, misread, that charge:
subdue was the false, the misplaced word in the story.
Surely we were to have been
earth's mind, mirror, reflective source.
Surely our task
was to have been
to love the earth,
to dress and keep it like Eden's garden.

That would have been our dominion:
to be those cells of earth's body that could
perceive and imagine, could bring the planet
into the haven it is to be known,
(as the eye blesses the hand, perceiving
it form and the work it can do)."

Denise Levertov (1923-1997)

see also Earth Gospel: A Guide to Prayer for God's Creation
by Sam Hamilton-Poore pg 44

New Hope

I re-invent myself on new hope.

- Barbara Mitchell

About the Bible

Short Answers to Big Questions
A Helpful Resource Revised and Expanded

Answers? Perhaps. Responses? Yes. Earlier this month Augsburg Books released a revised and expanded edition of Terence E. Fretheim's About the Bible: Short Answers to Big Questions. I have personally benefited from the first edition and have recommended it to many friends and family members. This welcomed revision provides a highly accessible resource for laity, pastors, students, and general inquisitors concerning pervasive questions with respect to the Bible. Two of the additional questions addressed in this edition include: "Did God create the world good and not perfect?" and "Does God cause natural disasters in the Bible?" While the questions in this volume are not ones that all have asked, I would submit that all who think about the Bible deal with some formulation of these questions to an extent, and to that end, this collection of responses is pertinent.

http://www.augsburgfortress.org/store/item.jsp?clsid=196246&productgroupid=0&isbn=0806657677

The Prophetic Imagination

The church will not have power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way out of enculturation. This is not a cry for traditionalism but rather a judgment that the church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity. And that is true among liberals who are too chic to remember and conservatives who have overlaid the faith memory with all kinds of hedges that smack of scientism and Enlightenment.

It is the task of prophetic ministry to bring the claims of the tradition and the situation of enculturation into an effective interface. That is, the prophet is called to be a child of the tradition, one who has taken it seriously in the shaping of his or her own field of perception and system of language, who is so at home in that memory that the points of contact and incongruity with the situation of the church in culture can be discerned and articulated with proper urgency.

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, pg.2.