FourSenses.net

Every year or so I spend the first week of July in Cambridge, UK. I am going again this year. I’ll spend a couple of days in London, five in Cambridge, back in London for a couple of days and then back home.

King’s College and Chapel

Last time I went to Cambridge, I did something I should have done years ago, I rented a bike (at City Cycle Hire, very nice service). I have always liked biking. Growing up in Belgium and without a car helped I guess. Cambridge being quite small and the area quite flat, it is easy and painless to explore the city and its surroundings by bike. If you visit Cambridge, rent a bike. I was able to bike to quite a few places I had never been to. One of them was the beautiful well-known village of Grantchester.

I have recently been playing around with Scapple. Scapple is somewhat of a simplified mind mapping program made by the same people behind Scrivener. Nice, simple, but quite useful. You might find a use for it.

For over ten years now work has been going on within the European Science Foundation to increase the visibility of European research in the Humanities. One tool that was developed was the ranking of journals in humanities. This led to the publication of the ERIH Initial List: Religious Studies and Theology (2007) which gave journals a ranking of A, B, C. This ranking induced confusion as to the quality of the publications.

Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Justice in Love. Eerdmans, 2011.

Wolsterstorff teaches philosophy at Yale (his title is “Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology Emeritus”). Before teaching at Yale he taught at Calvin College for about thirty years. For a more personal and autobiographical take on his combining philosophy and faith see his contribution in Philosophers who believe (IVP, 1997).

On Dec 3, 2011 the Evangelical Theological Faculty (Leuven) organized a day of conferences on Mission and Evangelism. I was asked to do a conference on the topic “Should We Talk Less About Evangelism?” Each of the four speakers had fifty minutes. A small interaction time was scheduled at the end. This was a nice opportunity and setting for me to continue testing my work on evangelism for the book in English I am hoping to finish in 2012. Then, hopefully, a publisher will pick it up.

John G. Turner. Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Working with students and on the historical and theological foundations of the contemporary discourse on evangelism, I try to read what’s available and good on these issues. After having read Meeting Jesus at University, I decided to read this book on Campus Crusade (recently renamed CRU, see also Campus Crusade International). Though the book dates back to 2008, I only discovered it recently.

John Stott passed away on July 27, 2011. He was born in 1921. More information on the memorial page on the John Stott.org site.

As I have said before, I have not offered to present papers at conferences the last few years (bad career move!). I am breaking this habit. Since I will be at the Tyndale Fellowship NT study group this coming July and since there was a free spot, I volunteered to step in. My paper will be “The Great Commission (Matt. 28.19–20) in History and Today or Why the Great Commission is not the Duty of All Believers.”

Stefan Kottwitz, L^aT_eX: Beginner’s Guide. Packt Publishing, 2011.

If you have looked around this site, you know that one of the tools I use to write is L^aT_eX. Though it might not be everybody’s cup of tea, it does look like it is becoming more and more popular in the humanities. A sign of this increasing popularity is this new book published by Pack Publishing.

I have mentioned in another post that Calvin already refers to the discussion of the works of the law in reference to ceremonials. Calvin refers back to Chrystostome, Origen, and Jerome. I had also mentioned Ambrosiaster’s reference to works of the law as sabbaths, circumcision, etc. Here are the references in his Romans commentary where Ambrosiaster brings this up from the English translation in the Ancien Christian Texts Series (Ambrosiaster. Commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians. Ancient Christian Texts. Edited by Thomas C. Oden and Gerald L. Bray. Translated by Gerald L. Bray. IVP Academic, 2009.)