I regularly recommend StepBible.org as a resource for students who want to do original language Bible searches or who need to look up parsing and definitions for unfamiliar Hebrew and Greek words. Unfortunately, StepBible does not yet provide access to a full Hebrew-English lexicon. To look up the full discussion in the still-valuable 1906 Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) lexicon, you will need to go to another site, such as Sefaria.org. This little video demonstrates how it works:
Thanks to a winter semester sabbatical, I was on pace to complete more than a book per week in 2025, but non-teaching-related reading took a nose dive when classes resumed, and I ended the year at 49 books—just shy of my goal of 52. Maybe next year?
Of the 49, I count 23 audiobooks and approximately 12 works of fiction, including such weighty tomes as E.B. White’s Stuart Little. As usual, my lightly annotated list is below.
Reading Highlights
Perhaps because it is the last thing I listened to in 2025, Alan Noble’s excellent short theological reflection On Getting Out of Bed stands out as a general interest highlight.
Another book I can’t commend highly enough is the Librivox recording of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius was one of those “I should really have read this by now” books. Completely fascinating, not least because it is a primary source compendium for many of the critical “introductory” questions that still occupy biblical scholars. Why did I wait so long?
My own reading highlight was (finally) finishing the Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek. I wrote about it here.
Current Events / History / Memoir
Ali, Ayaan Hirsi. Infidel. New York: Atria Books, 2008. (Audiobook)
Fascinating for many reasons, including the overlap with my own more limited memories of Kenya and Somalia in the 1980’s.
Arnold, John. History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford : New York: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000.
Beinart, Peter. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. New York: Knopf, 2025. (Audiobook)
Recommended. See this post for more reflections.
Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020. (Audiobook)
A Palestinian perspective that pairs nicely with Beinart.
Kirsch, Adam. On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice. Norton, 2024. (Audiobook)
Made some good points, but not against Khalidi.
Plokhy, Serhii. The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History. Norton, 2024. (Audiobook)
Rosen, Jeffrey. The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2024. (Audiobook)
Wacker, Grant. One Soul at a Time: The Story of Billy Graham. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2024. (Audiobook)
Reads like a history of 20th-century North American evangelicalism
Biblical Studies
Anderson, Gary A. Sin: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. (Audiobook)
Blogged here
Barton, John. A History of the Bible: The Book and Its Faiths. Penguin Books, 2020. (Audiobook)
Davis, Ellen F. Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament. Cambridge, Mass: Bloomsbury Academic, 2001. (Audiobook)
Eusebius of Caesarea. History of the Christian Church. Translated by Arthur Cushman McGiffert, 1890. Librivox recording, 2009. (Audiobook)
One of those “I should really have read this by now” books. Why did I wait so long?
Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. 3d ed. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.
Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
Recommended by the proprietor of Crux Books at Wycliffe College in 1999; I finally read it 26 years later. I wasn’t ready for it then; not sure I’m ready for it now. But now that I have read it, I notice its influence everywhere. Takes the prize for worst academic writing.
Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. Romans: A Commentary. NTL. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2024.
Gaventa’s major commentary has a high new idea to page ratio. The comparison with Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans is apt; it suffers from the same weaknesses. Well worth reading, but I won’t be assigning it as an undergraduate textbook again.
Hays, Richard B. Reading Backwards: Figural Christology and the Fourfold Gospel Witness. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2014.
The man at the desk next to mine at Tyndale House kept telling me I should read it. “It will do your soul good,” he said. I did. It did.
Lentz, John Clayton. Luke’s Portrait of Paul. SNTSMS 77. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Moffitt, David. Rethinking the Atonement: New Perspectives on Jesus’s Death, Resurrection, and Ascension. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2022.
Nongbri, Brent. God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.
Takes the prize for the most exciting (modern) academic book this year ... in a bittersweet way: Nongbri fills in the picture of the manuscripts behind our critical Greek New Testaments and makes you wonder about what has been lost.
Novenson, Matthew V. Paul, Then and Now. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2022.
Smith, David Andrew. Luke and the Jewish Other: Politics of Identity in the Third Gospel. New York: Routledge, 2023.
Stulac, Daniel J. D. Gift of the Grotesque: A Christological Companion to the Book of Judges. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2022.
Vanhoozer, Kevin J. Mere Christian Hermeneutics: Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2024. (Audiobook)
So substantial the audiobook left me with impressions only. Purchased a paper copy.
Witherington, Ben. A Week in the Life of Corinth. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2012.
Fiction, but not literature
Wright, N. T. Into the Heart of Romans: A Deep Dive into Paul’s Greatest Letter. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2023. (Audiobook)
Helpful to think with, but not finally compelling
Fiction / English Literature
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. London: Egerton, 1817. (reread)
Caldwell, Bo. City of Tranquil Light. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2010. (Audiobook)
Forster, E. M. A Room with a View. London: Penguin, 1908. (reread)
Heaney, Seumus. The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.
Hilton, James. Random Harvest. New York: Pocket Books, 1941.
Leacock, Stephen. Literary Lapses. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1957.
McCall Smith, Alexander. The Full Cupboard of Life: More from the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2005.
———. The Kalahari Typing School for Men. No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002.
O’Dell, Scott. Island of the Blue Dolphins. Newbery Medal Winner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. (reread)
Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2021. (Audiobook)
Rattigan, Terence. The Winslow Boy. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1946.
White, E. B. Stuart Little. New York: HarperCollins, 1973. (reread)
Other Languages
Martínez, Santiago Carbonell. ΛΟΓΟΣ : ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΓΛΩΣΣΑ ΑΥΤΟΕΙΚΟΝΟΓΡΑΦΗΜΕΝΗ (Logos. Lingua Graeca Per Se Illustrata). Cultura Clásica, 2023.
Meyer, Erika. Ein Briefwechsel. German Graded Readers Alternate Series Book 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1954. (I wish I had more of these to keep my rusty German on life support.)
Self-Help, etc.
Bain, Ken. What the Best College Students Do. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012.
Good ideas; condescending tone. The attempt to package research on learning as stories about exemplary learners seemed forced.
Brooks, David. How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. New York: Random House, 2023. (Audiobook)
Comer, John Mark. The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2019. (Audiobook)
Hurried through at 1.5+ speed.
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. New York: Penguin Press, 2024. (Audiobook)
Lang, James M. Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. 1st edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2016. (Audiobook)
Miller, Neil. Agents of Healing: Learning To Do What Jesus Did. North York, Ontario: Swordfish Publishing, 2024.
Newport, Cal. Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout. New York, NY: Portfolio, 2024. (Audiobook)
Hurried through at 2x speed.
Noble, Alan. On Getting Out of Bed: The Burden and Gift of Living. Westmont: IVP, 2023. (Audiobook)
Volf, Miroslav. The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2025. (Audiobook)
Walker, Matthew. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. New York: Scribner, 2017. (Audiobook)
For previous Reading Retrospectives, see this post and follow the links back.
When my students log-in to their course LMS this semester, they will encounter this warning:
This course is an AI-Free Zone: Because I am interested in what you think and in your own learning—including learning to communicate effectively in writing—the use of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grammarly Pro, etc., is strictly forbidden in this class.
- All written assignments for this course must be your own work presented in your own words.
- Students must be able to talk cogently about their written assignments and their research process. At the professor’s discretion, an oral interview may be required before a grade is assigned for any assignment. Failure to participate in the interview process will result in a 0 on the assignment.
(For good measure, the same statement appears on my syllabi.)
I am not, I think, naïve. I don’t imagine perfect compliance or that I will even be able to tell each time AI is used. I am also aware that this is not a structural change to course assessment: Rather than materially altering my assignments, I am relying on students to choose to follow my class rules instead of turning to the low-hanging fruit that is ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and other Large Language Models that masquerade as “artificial intelligence.”
But here’s the thing: AI-bots are very good at producing the kind of introductory thinking-piece essay that teachers have used for generations. The point in these kinds of assignments is not for students to make a new contribution to knowledge, but to learn as they think through classic intellectual problems on their own. These assignments have been used for so long because they work—or they did work until AI-bots came along. All of a sudden we have to look for alternatives to traditional but effective ways of helping students learn (including summarizing, analyzing, synthesizing, etc.). We may eventually come up with workarounds as good or better than our current approaches to teaching, but we aren’t there yet.
So instead of totally changing the way I teach—and in the process abandoning effective ways of helping students learn—I will try once more to persuade my students that turning to AI to complete assignments in my courses will only hurt themselves.
Here is one more reason why:
With great texts, the reading is its own reward. No potted summary of Plato’s Republic or Homer’s Odyssey will substitute for the real thing. These rich texts can’t be absorbed on a single reading; give them years of attention and they will still have more to say. As a teacher in the Humanities, a major part of my job is helping students learn to read. This includes reading and thinking about difficult texts. Again, it is the struggle that matters for learning and thinking. And so a Cole's notes version or an AI summary will not help students learn how to summarize or synthesize, and it will not get the texts inside them in a way that shapes their lives.
What is true about Plato's Republic is even more true about the Bible, a collection of texts whose meaning and implications cannot be exhausted. As a Christian educator, one of my primary aims is to help people connect with the text of Scripture. The point is not so much the right answer or correct prose, but getting the text inside you deep enough that it can do its inspired work.
Thankfully, in my confessional setting students tend to be open to this kind of argument. Some will continue to cheat themselves (and their professor). My role is not primarily to police the boundaries, but to try and create conditions that will motivate and enhance learning. Wish me luck.
Earlier posts on Education and AI:
From there I made my way through the major prophets Ezekiel (2017) and Jeremiah (2018). Reading Daniel (2018) required taking another swing at Aramaic, so I turned next to Ezra, with its Aramaic sections, and Nehemiah (2019). That left the Pentateuch (in Greek), the Former Prophets, the remainder of the Writings (including Proverbs), and the Minor Prophets.
Progress was slow over the next several years. I found I could make some headway during summers, but not during the school year when my day-job as a NT professor became all-consuming. To make a long story short, I finally completed a reading of the entire Hebrew Bible / Protestant Old Testament in Hebrew and Greek in June, almost 25 years after I began.
If there is a lesson here, it is the value of making a schedule and keeping to it. One of the great joys of last semester’s sabbatical was the chapter-a-day reading rhythm that, like a Duolingo streak, became a habit I didn’t want to break, and in due course brought me over the finish line.
I suspect reading the entire Bible in Hebrew or Greek is less common than it ought to be, even for those of us who teach the languages. But that doesn’t make it more than a baby step. I am well-aware that reading through texts just once is not the best way to build fluency or to retain new vocabulary. And I am nowhere near as literate or versed in Scripture (in any language) as I should be.
Consider John, a fourth-century Christian martyr, who, Eusebius says,
“ ... had written whole books of the Divine Scriptures, ‘not in tables of stone’ as the divine apostle says, neither on skins of animals, nor on paper which moths and time destroy, but truly ‘in fleshy tables of the heart,’ in a transparent soul and most pure eye of the mind, so that whenever he wished he could repeat, as if from a treasury of words, any portion of the Scripture, whether in the law, or the prophets, or the historical books, or the gospels, or the writings of the apostles. I confess that I was astonished when I first saw the man as he was standing in the midst of a large congregation and repeating portions of the Divine Scripture. While I only heard his voice, I thought that, according to the custom in the meetings, he was reading. But when I came near and perceived what he was doing, and observed all the others standing around him with sound eyes while he was using only the eyes of his mind, and yet was speaking naturally like some prophet, and far excelling those who were sound in body, it was impossible for me not to glorify God and wonder. - Eusebius, “Martyrs of Palestine” ch. 13.6-8
In Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels, Richard Hays asked:
“What would it mean to undertake the task of reading Scripture along with the Evangelists? First of all, it would mean cultivating a deep knowledge of the Old Testament texts, getting these texts into our blood and bones. It would mean learning the texts by heart in the fullest sense. The pervasive, complex, and multivalent uses of Scripture that we find in the Gospels could arise only in and for a community immersed in scriptural language and imagery. ... But alas, many Christian communities have lost touch with the sort of deep primary knowledge of Scripture—especially Israel’s Scripture—that would enable them even to perceive the messages conveyed by the Evangelists’ biblical allusions and echoes, let alone to employ Scripture with comparable facility in their own preaching and renarration of the gospel story.” - Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 357
So I celebrate baby steps, knowing that “the days of the years of my life ... have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers in the days of their pilgrimage.” (Gen 47:9 KJV)
Matteo Wong, writing for The Atlantic, puts it well:
A car that accelerates instead of braking every once in a while is not ready for the road. A faucet that occasionally spits out boiling water instead of cold does not belong in your home. Working properly most of the time simply isn’t good enough for technologies that people are heavily reliant upon. And two and a half years after the launch of ChatGPT, generative AI is becoming such a technology. ... Generative AI is a technology that works well enough for users to become dependent, but not consistently enough to be truly dependable. ... For now, the technology’s flaws are readily detected and corrected. But as people become more and more accustomed to AI in their life—at school, at work, at home—they may cease to notice. Already, a growing body of research correlates persistent use of AI with a drop in critical thinking; humans become reliant on AI and unwilling, perhaps unable, to verify its work.
Alan Jacobs, from whom I got several of these links, agrees:
The problem, according to Jacobs, is that in today’s universities, “the acquisition of knowledge” competes with the desire for a good job and the desire for a good time. Students turn to AI because they value the “university experience” and the diploma more than education.“Yes, students understand — they understand quite well, and vocally regret — that when they use chatbots they are not learning much, if anything.”
According to Jonathan Malesic, Generative AI apps, such as ChatGPT, are gimmicks that falsely promise a shortcut in place of the hard work that true teaching and learning requires:
“I have found, to overcome students’ resistance to learning, you often have to trick them. There’s the old bait-and-switch of offering grades, then seeing a few students learn to love learning itself. Worksheets are tricks, as are small-group discussions and even a teacher’s charisma. … I don’t know anyone for whom it’s a straightforward task. It’s the challenge for any teacher, and AI offers a tempting illusion to students—and evidently to some teachers—that there could be a shortcut. ... Part of a teacher’s job—certainly in the humanities, but even in professional fields like business—is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds. ... I will sacrifice some length of my days to add depth to another person’s experience of the rest of theirs. ... The work is slow. Its results often go unseen for years. But it is no gimmick.”
More than a gimmick, GenAI tools and the companies that produce them are actively hostile to learning:
Josh Eyler as quoted in CHE: “Learning is very hard work. It’s a deeply complex process …. If you offload onto AI the very cognitively demanding aspects of the learning process, then like a muscle atrophying, you’re weakening that process over time.”
Joss Fong as quoted in CHE: “Education researchers have this term ‘desirable difficulties,’ which describes this kind of effortful participation that really works but also kind of hurts. And the risk with AI is that we might not preserve that effort, especially because we already tend to misinterpret a little bit of struggling as a signal that we’re not learning.”
Lucas Ropek in “Multiple Studies Now Suggest That AI Will Make Us Morons”: “[T]he conclusion that using an app to complete a homework assignment makes you less capable of thinking for yourself would appear to be self-evident. Outsourcing mental duties to a software program means you’re not performing those duties yourself, and, as is pretty well established, doing something yourself is often the best way to learn.”
James D. Walsh in New York Magazine: “It’ll be years before we can fully account for what all of this is doing to students’ brains. Some early research shows that when students off-load cognitive duties onto chatbots, their capacity for memory, problem-solving, and creativity could suffer. Multiple studies published within the past year have linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants.”
And, in the best thing I’ve read on the topic, Megan Fritts writes:
“[T]he work that we bypass when using a calculator is less important than what we bypass when using an AI language generator for writing. To be a human self, a human agent, is to be a linguistic animal. … [T]o learn to use language just is to learn how to think and move about in the world. When we stop doing this—when our needs for communication are met by something outside of us, a detached mouthpiece to summon, describe and regale—the intimate connection between thought and language disappears. It is not only the capacity for speech that we will slowly begin to lose under such conditions, but our entire inward lives. ... [T]he real threat AI poses is not one of job replacement or grading frustration or having to reimagine assignments but something entirely different. ... [L]anguage-generating AI, whether it is utilized to write emails or dissertations, stands as an enemy to the human form of life by coming between the individual and her words. ... Preserving art, literature and philosophy will require no less than the creation of an environment totally and uncompromisingly committed to abolishing the linguistic alienation created by AI, and reintroducing students to the indispensability of their own voice.”
In sum, indiscriminate use of Generative AI—as encouraged by the likes of Microsoft, Google and OpenAI—is inimical to learning and antithetical to human flourishing.
For my earlier reflections on Gen AI and education, see On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores.
“From the destruction of the Second Temple to the expulsion from Spain to the Holocaust, Jews have told new stories to answer the horrors we endured. We must now tell a new story to answer the horror that a Jewish country has perpetrated, with the support of many Jews around the world. Its central element should be this: We are not history’s permanent virtuous victims. We are not hardwired to forever endure evil but never commit it. That false innocence, which pervades contemporary Jewish life, camouflages domination as self-defense. It exempts Jews from external judgment. It offers infinite license to fallible human beings.” (10)
“The legitimacy of a Jewish state—like the holiness of the Jewish people—is conditional on how it behaves. It is subject to law, not a law in and of itself (100).
My advice for students with a year of Biblical Hebrew under their belts who want to launch out on their own:
A high-quality recording produced by the Bible Society in Israel can be streamed or downloaded at Bible.is. (The recording is in a modern Israeli pronunciation, which means that distinctions between vocal and silent shewas are not always maintained, etc.)
Another more traditional recording narrated by Abraham Shmueloff can be accessed here: .
(2) Look up unfamiliar forms:
StepBible provides parsing and an abridged lexicon. (You will want to switch the Bible from ESV to THOT. You can do that manually, or click here: .)
Full versions of the standard (dated but still valuable) Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon can be searched online here:
(3) Read and Re-read until you can understand the text without looking up forms. I recommend a 1-2-3 reading process. For example, read Genesis 1:1-2 on day 1, Genesis 1:1-2 + 1:3-4 on day 2, and Genesis 1:3-4 + 1:5-6 on day 3. This way each reading will include review and new material.
Finally, some general advice:
