In the 1970s a friend gave me a copy of Kenneth Bailey’s The Cross and the Prodigal. I was blown away. It transformed my understanding of how to read the New Testament. Later I devoured Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes. Bailey’s basic thesis was that Middle Eastern peasant culture changes only very slowly. So if we want to understand the world that Jesus lived in, we should get to know Middle Eastern peasant culture today.
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Month: May 2016
Was Eliot Nuts?
I remember first coming upon T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and thinking it was completely nuts. I was in high school at the time. So it is a tautology to say I was quite sure of my opinions.
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Dance of the Titans
Franklin and Winston is a delightful piece of narrative history from one of the masters of the genre. By focusing on the relationship of these two titans rather than the massive array of events that was World War II, Meacham gives us, just as the very apt subtitle promises, “An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship.”
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