Holy and insatiable curiosity!

Look at this valiant bunch of Lifelong Learners who braved cold, snow, a four-hour round trip, and 14 consecutive presentations on theology to hear me tell the Zygon Center for Religion and Science at LSTC about OSLC's Science and the Bible classes!
As counter-intuitive as it may seem, academic study of the Bible can be a draw in congregations, if scholarly material is adapted to the parish setting.
Meaning, there should never be 14 consecutive presentations on theology...

Reach for the Stars!

Tomorrow, February 27, I'll be presenting a paper at the Student Symposium on Science and Spirituality at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago: "Reviving Public Theology: Integrative Approaches from the Parish". This paper is an account of a class I co-taught with Dr. Steven Bishop (Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UIUC) that tackled discrepancies between our modern view of "the stars in the sky" and those of the magi who appear in the nativity story of Matthew. The course itself was called "Reenter the Magi: Astrophysics, Faith, and the Hubble Space Telescope".
I can give you the gist of my paper here: for the sake of public discussion and public theology, the congregation must take it upon itself to provide education in both historical-literary critical approaches to the Bible--such as you are learning in Ootle15!--and modern scientific methods and discoveries. So many debates regarding public policy --on vaccination, climate change, marriage equality, the teaching of evolution, to name only four that have been prominent in the news lately-- require scientific literacy to understand and biblical hermeneutics to discuss, that responsible Christians must pursue lifelong education in both science and Bible.  Our class at Our Saviour's Lutheran Church was a preliminary attempt at this kind of congregational-level education.
Also, Dr. David Hogue will be delivering one of the Keynote addresses: "Because We Are: Practical Theology, Intersubjectivity and the Social Brain", and my fellow Garrett PhD student, Kwang Oh, will be speaking on "Brain as Technology: God's Creation, or Creation of a God?", so Garrett will be well represented!

When flying monkeys attack...

There's a scene in The Wizard of Oz where the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion find the poor battered Scarecrow after he's been set upon by the Wicked Witch's Flying Monkeys. The Scarecrow says, "They tore my legs off and threw them over there! Then they took my chest out and threw it over there!"
The Tin Man replies, "Well, that's you all over."
This is kind of how I feel about the participants of Ootle15. Instead of being tidily in one place, the way students are in conventional classrooms, you seem to be all over. Instead of being identifiable faces and voices, you are strewn about the Ootle landscape in tweets and blogs and Moodle reports. Week by week, I assemble you in my mind. Slowly you are coming together, Ootlers.
"They sure knocked the stuffings out of you, didn't they."
"Don't stand there talking, put me together--we've got to find the Tanak!"

I hope they nag you incessantly

Dr. Lester made me very happy by mentioning my master's thesis in this week's Ootle15 Hangout. No one really expects their master's thesis to be remembered for longer than ten minutes after it has been published, even by their advisors.
Yes, my master's thesis was on getting seminary-level methodologies into the congregational Bible study. It was titled "Moving Out the Tent Pegs: Enlarging the Parish Bible Study with Seminary Concepts." It was about my long, lonely battle to make lay people aware of how much better, more inspiriting, more encouraging, more enlivening, and more abundant their readings of the Bible could be, if they would just make use of the fruits of Academic Biblical Scholarship! (Actually I am not quite so lonely any more, because I am now on an Adult Education Team at my church--Our Saviour's Lutheran--that gets it.)
When I was working on my thesis, people would ask me about it such a way as to make me think they were hoping I would discover whose "fault" it was that historical-literary critical methodologies weren't making it into the parish. Pastors were hoping I would discover it was the fault of seminary professors, seminary professors were hoping I would discover it was the fault of pastors. Lay people were hoping I would discover it was the fault of both pastors and seminary professors.
My answer, as outlined in my thesis, was that it was no one's "fault", at least at the historical moment in which I was writing my thesis. Previously, the resources, relationships, genres, and communication systems needed to import these methods into the parish were lacking. Now, however, they are widely available. Academic Biblical Scholarship is everywhere we look. It's on our TVs, DVRs, laptops, tablets, phones, Kindles, and bedside tables. For pity's sakes, Walter Brueggemann and Adam Hamilton are cranking out two books a year!
So now, if these methods do not make it into the parish, it is clear whose "fault" it is: it is the fault of lay people. There. I said it.
Lay people are now at least 50 year behind the Academy in terms of learned and Gospel-filled Bible study. They have to get on it, right now.
My fervent dream for all you MDivs is that when you go to be interviewed for a position as a professional Christian, the people interviewing you will question you closely as to your mastery of the good old classic and also the very latest and most currently fashionable Bible study techniques. ("What's this 'performance criticism' we're hearing about these days?") And if you get the job, and you preach on a text without situating it in its historic context, they will look at you funny. ("Don't you think that was a little bit supersessionist?") And if you offer a Bible study that neglects to take into account the language in which the text was originally written, they will complain. ("Are we supposed to believe that the word 'redeemer' always means exactly the same thing to everyone?")
Do I think this will happen? No, I don't.
But I pray that it may.

See that guy in the blue shirt on the right? He's the Chair of our new Call Committee. See the woman in the light jacket sitting next to him? That's our Chair of Adult Education. See the woman in the dark shirt on the left? That's the Chair of our Living Beyond Our Walls Team. See the woman in the green shirt? She's on Church Council. I could go on.
These people are pillars of our church. And they know what Q is.

Can pastors be the bridge?

During the ootle15 Hangout on Air, I tweeted "We need to be creating an audience for academic biblical studies among church members." Nyasha Junior responded: "I think that pastors can be the bridge."
We hope that pastors can be the bridge between academia and the congregation. Otherwise, why would Dr. Lester be laboring so earnestly to construct this cutting-edge course on Ostensively-An-Introduction-to-the-Old-Testament-But-Really-an-Introduction-to-the-Tanak? Why else would I be struggling to master communication technologies that I am temperamentally and temporally unsuited for, if I didn't think that Garrett students could go out into the highways and the byways and help people to become as enthralled with our canon as I am?
However, I am skeptical, because I know how long professors have been training seminarians in these Bible study methods.
I can't help but feel that if pastors were going to be the bridge, it would have happened by now.
If pastors had been being that bridge, people doing Bible study at their churches would now be casually conversant with the historical-literary critical method, instead of still believing that Moses wrote the Pentateuch.
If it hasn't happened by now, there must be something going on to prevent it. It would be nice to know what that is.

Thus far today I have communicated with various persons by the following means

Thus far today I have communicated with various persons by the following means:
I spoke with several people face to face.
I spoke to two people on the phone.
I wrote some thank-you notes by hand.
I typed some emails.
I posted on Facebook.
I Tweeted on Twitter.
I messaged.
I gestured at a fellow driver. (No, that kind of gesture; I indicated that he should feel free to pull out of his parking space.)
I worked on a paper which is destined to be delivered in a rallying tone to an audience at a symposium in a couple of weeks.
I blogged.
All this mades me feel like a very fluent 21st century communicator; look at all the different forms I've mastered!
However, last night I was talking with my daughter (on the phone: unusual because we usually email or message) and she informed me that she doesn't Twitter, she Snap-Chats. She explained Snap-Chat to me. I was dubious, but asked if I should sign up for it. She said that she felt it would probably not be worth the trouble, since I probably didn't know enough people who could or would Snap-Chat with me. She is perfectly right.
Also, I'm not sure how many more different ways to say things to people I can absorb before my head explodes.

Hail, Ten-Thirty Adult Education Group of Our Saviour's!

For our Sunday morning Bible study at my church, we are currently watching Dr. Amy-Jill Levine’s The Great Courses DVD series, “Great Figures of the New Testament.” This week’s session was on the Virgin Mary. I thought that I, as the lone trained Biblical scholar in the group, would probably be the only one who could truly appreciate Levine’s effortless command of multiple scholarly methodologies. There she was, my hero, slinging everything from form to redaction to canonical to doctrinal criticism like a veteran short order cook, all in the service of helping people appreciate and resonate to those biblical texts.

But it turns out that you don’t need an MTS to appreciate Levine. Already several people have come up to me, positively glowing, and said how wonderful they felt it was to be a part of the experience of having a Jewish New Testament scholar explain so ably to us—a group of Protestants who normally never think about Mary except at Christmas—the significance of these stories and ideas about Mary. They couldn’t precisely identify each intellectual turn Levine made in her account—all they knew was, thanks to Levine, they were able to hear the stories about Mary with “new ears”!

This just confirms me in my belief that scholarly methodologies are the best tool we’ve got for the proclamation of Good News. We’re lucky to be living in a time when this material is so get-at-able: on TV, DVDs, phone, tablet, or laptop. It’s a Golden Age for laypersons who value biblical scholarship.