I’m in the process of switching over to wordpress. I’m tired of Blogger’s sluggishness and comment difficulty. That and over a year ago Blogger promised to send me a hoodie for my loyalty and never did.

I wrapped up a very productive week of study yesterday and then drove to Dallas last night. Now I’m just outside of Ft. Worth at Heather’s parents’ house. Tomorrow we’ll head on to Abilene for the ACU Lectures. I haven’t been to these lectures in almost 10 years. I’ve heard they’ve changed a lot since then. I hope so. They were dreadful when I was in grad. school at ACU.

Here is a rundown of the books I worked through this week:

The Resurrection of the Son of God
Stormfront: The Good News of God
Treasures in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness
Affluenza
The Overspent American

I gave The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernity a very quick skim and decided it was too dense to do much with right now. I’ll come back to it later and work at digesting it in small chunks.

I spent yesterday working through “The Resurrection of the Son of God.” By “working through,” I don’t mean that I read every word on every page, but I did acquaint myself with the overall shape of Wright’s argument until I felt I had a sufficient understanding of it. Today I’ll dive back into some specific sections that I want to flesh out. If you know how to read a book, you can get at the heart of an argument without reading everything. This is especially helpful when you’re not sure you want to invest a huge amount of time into a book. Before I give a book detailed attention, I try to find out where it is going, then I know whether or not I want to spend extra time with it.

“The Resurrection of the Son of God” is worth the time. N. T. Wright’s work always bolsters my faith and stretches my mind.

Here is a great quote from the final page:

No wonder the Herods, the Caesars and the Sadducees of this world, ancient and modern, were and are eager to rule out all possibility of actual resurrection. They are, after all, staking a counter-claim on the real world. It is the real world that the tyrants and bullies (including intellectual and cultural tyrants and bullies) try to rule by force, only to discover that in order to do so they have to quash all rumours of resurrection, rumours that would imply that their greatest weapons, death and deconstruction, are not after all omnipotent. But it is the real world, in Jewish thinking, that the real God made, and still grieves over. It is the real world that, in the earliest stories of Jesus? resurrection, was decisively and for ever reclaimed by that event, an event which demanded to be understood, not as a bizarre miracle, but as the beginning of the new creation. It is the real world that, however complex this may become, historians are committed to studying. And, however dangerous this may turn out to be, it is the real world in and for which Christians are committed to living and, where necessary, dying. Nothing less is demanded by the God of creation, the God of justice, the God revealed in and as the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth.

Today I’ll be spending some time in N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God.