Hebrew Scriptures and More . . . .

While working on the intertextual allusions related to Numbers 11, I stumbled onto Jeffery Leonard’s article dealing with the allusions found in Psalm 78. (Jeffery M. Leonard, “Identifying inner-Biblical allusions: Psalm 78 as a test case,” JBL 127, no. 2 (2008), 241-265.) The article is a snapshot of his 2006 Brandeis University Ph.D. dissertation. Leonard present two especially important guidelines/series of questions:

1. First, eight methodological principles that form a guideline:

“(1) Shared language is the single most important factor in establishing a textual connection. (2) Shared language is more important than nonshared language. (3) Shared language that is rare or distinctive suggests a stronger connection than does language that is widely used. (4) Shared phrases suggest a stronger connection than do individual shared terms. (5) The accumulation of shared language suggests a stronger connection than does a single shared term or phrase. (6) Shared language in similar contexts suggests a stronger connection than does shared language alone. (7) Shared language need not be accompanied by shared ideology to establish a connection. (8) Shared language need not be accompanied by shared form to establish a connection.” (p. 246)

2. Six Questions to determine the direction of allusions:

“(1) Does one text claim to draw on another? (2) Are there elements in the texts that help to fix their dates? (3) Is one text capable of producing the other? (4) Does one text assume the other? (5) Does one text show a general pattern of dependence on other texts? (6) Are there rhetorical patterns in the texts that suggest that one text has used the other in an exegetically significant way?” (p. 258)

Joseph Kelly has inaugurated a new blog, כל־האדם, that has several posts on Biblical Theology, Open Theism and Openness Theology. They are worthy of a read and discussion:
1. Biblical Theology and Openness
2. Biblical Theology and Openness - 2
3. Biblical Theology and Openness - 3
4. On the Abuse of a Literary Device

Wesley Fryer’s blog has linked to a well done youtube on education in the 21st century. Although it is about primary and secondary education, the issues are just as applicable to Biblical/Theological Education in both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

HT: Wesley Fryer: Moving at the Speed of Creativity - Making the case for blended learning, thinking about designs for modern learning spaces.

Here is a thought provoking lecture on collaborative learning by John Seely Brown.

HT: Technology Trends: Learning in a Digital Age.

The Ancient World Bloggers Group has published a general information and links to the digital versions of the Oriental Institutes publication in a post entitled: AWOL - The Ancient World Online 2. This list is helpful for quick reference.

Professor April DeConick has helpfully linked to Gerd Lüdemann’s new posted article, “The Relationship of Biblical Studies to the History of Religions School, with References to the Scientific Study of Religion.” (the pdf version here)

I recommend this article to my students as an important read concerning the History of Religions School of thought. One may not agree with some of Professor Lüdemann’s proposals but they should be heard and understood.

The following is just a few highlights that caught my attention:

Gerd Lüdemann notes that “theology as a scientific discipline seeks the truth, and in this it is connected to all other university disciplines. For this reason Church theology can never be classified as a scientific pursuit.”

History of Religions School (HRS): “The main conviction was that religion was not fixed; rather, it developed in accordance with human history.”

HRS’s 4 Domains or Approaches:

1) “‘Religionsgeschichtlich‘ means, first of all, that religion as such is to be studied using a radically historical methodology.”

2) “The second thrust of HRS’s research concerns comparative religion; in fact, in this context, ‘religionsgeschichtlich‘ means comparative religion.”

3) “The third focus of the HRS deals with its employment of sociological elements as a way to understand early Christianity more accurately.”

4) “A fourth and final aspect of HRS method has to do with the discovery of original Christian belief as a phenomenon to be understood psychologically. In concrete terms, the members of the group turned away from a general theory of dogmatics and toward an emphasis on the primacy of experience.”

Biblical Studies and the HRS for today:

1) “Only a single, unitary science can be dedicated to the study of religions of the past and present. All efforts to diminish strictly scientific research in this area, or to “pluralize” it, are exposed to the suspicion of not taking the scientific task seriously. Personal beliefs must not be allowed to influence science; nor can scholars be allowed to misuse research into non-Christian religions in an attempt to demonstrate their imperfections. Finally, all mention of “understanding” must be stricken from the scientific study of religion, for this amounts to faith-based, revelation-theology.”

2) “. . . true objectivity means relinquishing the canonicity or sacredness of particular writings, any claims to a “revelation,” and all distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy except as a subject of historical discourse.”

3) “All our lives we must fight against a reluctance to return to original sources. Nothing is so paralyzing for historical criticism as the search for solutions to historical problems outside the historical context. The only valid methodological principle is to infer the unknown from the known, to begin with well-established facts and from there to find one’s way back to what is less certain.”

Personally, I struggle with the concept of doing away with faith-based research. I understand the implicitly biased nature of faith-based research which presupposes a revelation-theology, but I am not quite sure I want to, nor can I, do away with it when doing research. The HRS provides us with some important methodological questions that remain on the table.

The web provides a cornucopia of materials to improve one’s teaching. Here are a few sites that I have stumbled on with the help of many links:

1) 100 Free Online Lectures that will make you a better teacher posted by Heidi Taylor.

2) Free Technology for Teachers which is a “review of free technology and how teachers can use them. Ideas for technology integration in education.”

3) Open Education is a blog “site dedicated to tracking the changes occcurring in education today.

Here are two recent cloudwares that may be helpful for teaching:

1) Diigo which allows for highlighting, sticky notes and sharing of web-based research.

2) Edmodo is a microblogging based Learning Management System.

As the interest in mobile learning or M-Learning increases, projects are being undertaken to make the process easy and simple to use for both teachers and learners. Moodle, the course management software / learning management system that I have been using in the last couple of years has been starting to work on add-ons to facilitate this growing field. I would like to point to two links:

1) MOMO (Mobile Moodle) Project which is going the route of developing a JAVA based application for mobile phones.

2) Moodle for Mobiles is a working add-on for Moodle 1.9 (1.6 is also available), which uses CHTML (Compact HTML) to interface with Moodle. This is the dominate format that is used in 98% of the mobile phones in Japan. I will be using this one in the up coming weeks.

BTW note the technology report by Maggie Shiels in the BBC News, April 20th, 2009 entitled, “Is the mobile web coming of age?“

Elaine Jarvik article, “Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professors says,” follows the thoughts of David Wiley. She writes: “Higher education doesn’t reflect the life that students are living, he says. In that life, information is available on demand, files are shared, and the world is mobile and connected. Today’s colleges, on the other hand, are typically ‘tethered, isolated, generic, and closed,’ he says.”

Wiley may be over-emphasizing the poor state of higher education today, but his prediction that one’s institution will be irrelevant by 2020, may be spot-on if educators and educational administrators do not kept up with the skyrocketing educational technological advances. I have heard of one theological education administrator that has publicly argued that the use of technology and/or the internet in education is just a passing fad. Although this administrator’s opinion is obviously a minority opinion, it may sadly have followers that lead their institutions into irrelevancy in the near future.

Quality of education and training does not have to be sacrificed when providing an on-demand, shared resource, mobile and connected learning environment. It does however mandate that theological educators commit to being open to technological advances and to always be learning themselves.

Toni Bowers chronicles a IT project failure in her post “IT projects fail most often due to organizational issues.” Quoting Krigsman, Bowers notes that “the reasons for the problems are usually not technical; they’re “organizational, political and cultural in nature in almost every case.”

This observation is an important insight that should be considered when educators, educational leaders or school boards are considering eLearning innovations. Bowers further notes that, “organizational, political, and cultural issues are the hardest to pinpoint and to fix. In my experience, poor communication among stakeholders and project principles is the underlying disease of all bad projects.”