Recently in Lectures Category

Larry Hurtado, Professor of New Testament at Edinburgh University in Scotland, will give the 8th Annual Kermit Zarley Lectures at North Park University this Wednesday and Thursday. Both lectures are open to the public and will begin at 3:30pm. The lectures are held at Isaacson Chapel at the Seminary.

Hurtado's life work has been in the origins of early Christian understandings of Jesus. In particular, his Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity
is a breath-taking and judicious explanation of how early Christians learned to worship Jesus alongside God the Father.

Thanks to the kind invitation of Jerry Rushford at Pepperdine University (yes, that's a good picture of what it really looks like), I gave two lectures Tuesday -- one to local pastors about my spiritual autobiography and one to the students on the Jesus Creed. Not sure where to begin...

I'll try with this: Pepperdine is a Jewel of the Churches of Christ. The Churches of Christ "denomination" (forgive me, Jerry) is a local-church directed Christian movement of some 1.25 million Christians. One of its only organizational centers is Christian colleges (like Pepperdine -- but there isn't anything quite like Pepperdine). Pepperdine sits atop a mountain ascending from the ocean in Malibu with a natural, beautiful architecture, and maintains a rigorous academic standard. When I got up Tuesday morning there were deer (little guys) in the back yard and a red-tailed hawk swooping down the slope.

It was good to see Randy Chesnutt, a NT scholar and professor there who has made contributions in pseudepigraphical studies, and to meet his son who stayed up the night before to read Jesus Creed. I met so many that I'll stop there.

It is easy to gush about the spectacular setting -- and I haven't even mentioned sitting outside the lecture hall after the lecture under the stars, but what most impressed me is that Pepperdine is succeeding at something many Christians schools aspire to: to maintain rigorous academic standards and to keep the Christian mission of a school central. It is much easier to talk about than accomplish.
My hosts were Jerry and Lori Rushford, and Jerry (an old basketball coach) was sensitive enough to schedule the BCS football game as part of my time there. (What a disastrous game though.) I stayed in the Mallman house up the moutain with Darryl and Anne Tippens. (Darryl is Provost, and a Milton scholar -- and we had great breakfast conversation.)

This was the first time I was asked to give my spiritual autobiography. It shows my age that I was asked not to give a "testimony" but an autobiography. It was fun thinking about, and I developed four themes: the importance of personal faith, a commitment to biblical orthodoxy, the centrality of the local church, and the significance of maintaining catholicity in our spirtual formation.

The evening talk about Jesus Creed went well; it was delightful to see so many students arrive and they were a very responsive and alert group.

Here is a paper I gave at North Park last year, in which I explore an implication or two of the Italian Renaissance writings on education, in which I offer a mild case for their being a good canon of books that are worth reading for all college students. It is also available through the sidebar.

I call it the Trojan Horse.

I gave a paper some five or six years ago at North Park on the nature of a Christian college, especially as it applies at my school. The exploration of a Christian education through the categories of monotheism, polytheism, and henotheism is suggestive for me, and I wonder what you might think of it. The paper is also available now through the sidebar. For some reason, the .pdf files comes out backward. If you know why, go ahead and explain it in the Comments (but go slowly). If not, print it out and it'll be perfect shape in the printer tray!

The Paper is called "The Big Muddy."

The following is a lecture I gave at North Park, and at a few other places and in a few different forms. It studies "liberal arts" and then encourages writing. I shared some of these in a previous blog, enough wrote to me for a copy of the whole thing, so here it is.

I have a friend at a major research university who teaches on Thursday afternoons, 3-5, and when he learned my hours of teaching he asked with a snarl, “How do you get anything done?” I have another friend, a high school driver’s education teacher who never reads a book but who teaches from 7:20am to 3:30pm with a one hour break and who also coaches after school, who asks me regularly, “Is it because you can’t stand the pressure that you don’t do anything?” I have another friend, a manual laborer, whose comments to me are of this order: “How can go through life not doing anything?”

For full text, click here.

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In the Autumn of 1989, I gave a lecture to my Synoptic Gospels class at Trinity that got suddenly out of hand. I never intended it to, and because it did get out of hand, I never gave it again....