ONE OF THE THINGS that I've found out through the internet is that contrary to the typical pseudo-lefty secularist prejudice, a lot of professional clergy are not only very intelligent, they are some of the deepest thinkers about current affairs. And as someone who is a sort of Catholic-plus, it has been a revelation and a pleasure to find out how deeply many protestant ministers and preachers can be when they discuss the world we live in out of their experience of reading and studying the ancient Jewish scriptures. I came across the Youtube channel Working Preacher which is described:
From the Center for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary, we are dedicated to the renewal of the church's proclamation. WorkingPreacher.org posts resources for preaching, and we will be adding videos here from scholars, students, and events to help further the craft of preaching.
I'm in the process of doing a massive transplanting job, always an occasion for listening to lectures and interviews and discussions. I was going to post a recent interview with Walter Brueggemann on his newest book about Preaching Jeremiah but I think the discussion by three preacher-scholars about the official lexicon for next Sunday, June 6 has one of the best explanations I've ever heard of why people, from the time of Samuel till today love to hand over control to gangsters, kings or dictators. If I didn't need to get this work done today I'd type out the text of what was said but I recommend listening to it and the entire discussion because it is excellent stuff and not infrequently quite amusing. I've found that far from being the stereotypical pietists, these people have a very realistic, very serious but also very humane understanding of what Brueggemann said he always goes back to, texts that were retained as Scriptures because in the centuries in which the Bible was being assembled, people found great value in what could be learned from the texts. I think that their discussion of the texts is a really valuable entry point into them and the vast repository of criticism and commentary on the texts. Far from being useless baggage from the past, this is enormously important, enormously informative recording of human experience considered at a very high level.
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