You Snooze...

...and you lose out on some great posts elsewhere.

Of course, my defense is that I have been either laid up sick (thrice! in one month!) or caught up in furious and frantic levels of activity that are common to the terms around here.

Nevertheless, here are some posts and other things worth checking out:

Maggi writes about Richard Dawkins, "neutral" perspectives, and the twists and turns of trying to raise faithful children.

Andy writes about Stephen Fowl, one of my favourite Biblical scholars and theologians (although his disciplinary formation is the former, he ably functions in the latter as well). Andy is reading Steve's book Engaging Scripture right now, which I thought was an excellent work. It's good to see someone wrestling with it publicly, so I encourage you to check it out.

"Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy."
-- Wendell Berry

This and a number of other wonderful quotations may be found in a recent post on Mode for Caleb. Along with the Berry quote, I particularly liked the Jonathon Kozol one.

And finally -- like nothing if not from the sublime to the ridiculous -- a good friend at UVa. recently pointed out that I have begun blurbing books. He said something about it being nice to be important enough for publishers to use me to sell a book.

Well...

Gulp.

I say -- when you start believing your own press releases, then you've had it. Public Enemy had some good sense advice: don't believe the hype.

But it is true -- not that I'm important like that, but that they have been using my blurbs. Unbeknownst to me, Brazos Press has been excerpting from my book reviews which run in Reviews in Religion and Theology. If you actually want to check them out, there are two: here and here. You need to scroll down past the real blurbs with the real names to get there, but they're there. The first one was a joint review with a dear friend. Both of them were good books, and I'm generally pretty excited about what Brazos puts out, so I'm glad to be seen supporting these works. But believe me, I get more honour out of being quoted on the Brazos website than they get by quoting me.