More Great Music

I should have more nights where 350 pages of reading is assigned: I get so much more posting done. A magnificent album that is very worth the price I paid for it eight years ago is Don Potter's Facing the Wall. It is instrumental, and possibly not for everyone, but is a display of absolutely magnificent guitar music in various genres. It has crept into almost every playlist that I have, and I've yet to tire of it. Terrific album. Click on my title.

Great Music

The Shoemaker Brothers are a band that is fairly local to our Moscow area, though they will be touring the west coast shortly. Their music is acoustic rock in the best sense: violins (yes, that's plural), guitar, piano and drums or bass. Each of the four brothers plays all of the above instruments, and that quite well. The vocals are in some places iffy, and in others downright distracting, but all in all it is very worthwhile. Click on my title for their link.

Hermeneutics: "Apocalyptic"

Tonight, or early tomorrow as the case may be, I will finish N.T. Wright's tremendous book The New Testament and the People of God. This 400 page magnum opus serves as his introduction to Jesus and the Victory of God, and its magnificence is hard to overemphasize. It reinterprets everything from the Pharisees to the Macabaeans and Hasmoneans, and all done exegetically, soberly, conservatively, and eruditely. Of all the books that I have read in my NSA career, this one has been the most illuminating (save perhaps Capon's eloquence upon the onion) and the most paradigmatically momentous. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Among all of this brilliance, he has a magnificent throw-away paragraph on the exegeting of Apocalyptic literature:

"We do this all the time ourselves. I have often pointed out to students that to describe the fall of the Berlin Wall, as one well might, as an 'earth-shattering' event might perhaps lead some future historian, writing in the Martian Journal of Early European Studies, to hypothesize that an earthquake had caused the collapse of the Wall, leading to both sides realizing they could live together after all. A good many readings of apocalyptic literature in our own century operate on about that level of understanding."

N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, page 282: Part III: First-Century Judaism

Ouch.

"But no matter how many helpful things you say, if you leave the really huge question out, then all you are really displaying is a real loss of proportion. "Well, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?"

--Doug Wilson
click my title

Intriguing Speech Compilation

This speech compilation is actually really funny: "Shame on you..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6wRkzCW5qI
or click on the title.

Enjoy.