Where do I turn for fresh inspiration? How do I learn from others who practice the spiritual life? Spiritual reading is part of the answer. Great devotional classics encourage me; but I also need contemporary thoughts and insights. New writers (or those who are new to me) keep me reflecting and pray

Modern biblical study is not only a literary and theological enterprise but also a historical discipline. The term “history,” however, is hardly univocal. The six books covered here illustrate some of the approaches involved in writing about the Bible and history. They show that in the c

Johannes Albrecht Bengel (1687-1752), the scholar generally regarded as the founder of New Testament textual criticism, had a wonderful Latin saying about reading Scripture: Te totum applica ad textum; rem totam applica ad te (“Apply your whole self to the text; apply the whole thing to yourse

Who was Jesus, and what did he say and do? Was Jesus really raised from the dead? Why and when did Christians begin to worship Jesus? These questions go to the roots of Christian faith. The three massive books discussed here provide pertinent information and interpretive options that Christians toda

The clergy sexual abuse scandal has left us stunned and confused. But crisis in the church is not a new phenomenon. One of the most important spiritual resources in times of crisis in the church has been Scripture. Two items in this year’s roundup of books on the Bible deal explicitly with Cat

For the past several hundred years, since the invention of the printing press and the dissemination of books in fact, the most frequent encounter with the poem has been with what we find on the page. But that is not the way poetry was meant to be experiencedany more, I suppose, than Scripture should