Retrospect and Prospect 2026 Edition

Nine years ago today when the world was young, before Covid, before Zoom, before AI, before Brexit, and before the latest chaos in Washington and the Middle-East, our little family departed for Cambridge, England so the other Dr. Miller could begin work on her PhD. After dropping my daughter off at primary school, I would cycle across town to the research library at Tyndale House where I rented a desk. (What better location for a mid-life crisis?) I also attended seminars at the Faculty of Divinity, and participated in a short-lived Philo of Alexandria Greek reading group led by the late James K. Aitken.

Toward the end of our time in Cambridge, Professor Aitken, in his characteristic generosity, invited me to dine with him at Fitzwilliam College. As I related to Jim what I had been up to during my almost two years in Cambridge, I mentioned that I had flown home three times to teach three different courses. “Oh,” Jim responded, “That’s a 50% load then.” At Cambridge, apparently, three courses per year is a full teaching load. I didn’t have the heart to explain that at my institution a full annual teaching load is seven courses per year. 

Because a former colleague took a job closer to his family in the States too late for us to hire a replacement, I get to teach more Hebrew than I anticipated this year. Here is what my (overload) assignment looks like for the year ahead: 

Fall Semester
Introductory Hebrew I 
Introductory Hebrew II (see this post for more details)
Advanced Hebrew Syntax and Exegesis
Jewish Backgrounds to Early Christianity
(All four courses are cross-listed between the college and seminary; the seminary version of each course is also open to students at a distance over Zoom.)

Winter Semester
Hebrew Syntax and Exegesis I
Hebrew Syntax and Exegesis II
BLST 109 Introduction to the New Testament
BLST 304 Acts  

It will be a full year. Expect radio silence.

 

 

An AI Commonplace Part II: Possible Responses

“If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI. You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history. ... Most of all, ... you would love the way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini have thrown a grenade into thousands of years of teaching and learning: the way they threaten to upend our ability to think with the robust clarity that is needed in emergencies of justice. - Katherine Rundell

In a previous post, I outlined the threat AI poses to education and learning in the Humanities. Here, I describe possible responses:

A non-starter for me is requiring students to use and evaluate AI in class. The best way to build AI-literacy is to learn to think without it. (See this 10 July 2026 column by Scott Carlson in CHE.)

(1)  Persuasion: First, then, we can and should try to persuade students to learn for their own sake. Good examples include:

• Katherine Rundell (again): “I tell the students I meet: imagine you’re an Olympic athlete. You set out to sprint the 3km across London, from Clapham to Balham. You know if you take the bus, it will be faster. But you also know that the point was never being in Clapham or Balham; they’re very similar: they both have a nice Pizza Express. It was the strength you built, the speed and knowledge of your body that you gained. A student’s essay on Macbeth has no value as a product. It’s what you learned in the reading and writing that created it – the swiftness and resilience and suppleness of thinking you built, along with the knowledge gained of a literary marvel, of something quicksilver and unsummarisable – that was the point. So you can’t collaborate with AI in the same way you can’t collaborate with a bus. And you cannot learn to think without a climbing frame of facts and ideas and texts to move around in.”  
• Jennifer Frey: “What I remind them of, in very clear terms, is that if they outsource their thinking, they’re simply outsourcing their own humanity.”
• From a more theological perspective, Russell Moore writes: “[T]echnology will make it easier and easier for you to stop thinking, to stop paying attention, to stop the renewal of your mind. Part of what it means to love is to conserve your ability to think, feel, and create. That requires paying attention to where the present age is attempting to pull you, and to map out another, harder way. Your brain does not belong to you. It was bought with a price. Guard that trust.” (See also Jordan Daniel Wood’s theological ‘mini-manifesto.’)

Last year I hoped to be able to get by with persuasion:

“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.

That attempt failed, at least in my first and second year classes. Although my role was not primarily “to police the boundaries,” my zero-tolerance policy, among other things, resulted in enough unpleasant conversations with students already skilled in the arts of AI for me to resolve to change my approach in required entry-level classes.

(2) A Total Institutional Ban: Perhaps because he is now a journalist rather than a faculty member, Tyler Austin Harper, with the luxury of idealism, calls for a total institutional ban on artificial intelligence:

“All institutions of higher education in the United States should be animated by the same basic question: What are the most effective things—even if they sound extreme—that we can do to limit, and ideally abolish, the unauthorized use of AI on campus? Once the schools have an answer, their leaders should do everything in their power to make these things happen. ... They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution [including Wi-Fi, smartphones, and laptops]. … Taking drastic measures against AI in higher education is not about embracing Luddism, which is generally a losing proposition. It is about creating the conditions necessary for young people to learn to read, write, and think, which is to say, the conditions necessary for modern civilization to continue to reproduce itself. Institutions of higher learning can abandon their centuries-long educational project. Or they can resist.” - Tyler Austin Harper, “The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI”

Or maybe Harper simply has a clear-eyed view of the extent of the problem. 

(3) A Flipped Classroom: Since a total institutional tech ban is beyond my reach, I intend to combine a total classroom tech ban with a flipped class model in my first and second-year courses. Following the lead of many others (see here, here, here, here, and especially here), introductory students will write all assignments by hand in class. 

To be sure, important things are lost in this approach—that is where the grieving comes in—but persuasion is not enough:

“Telling classroom instructors they can have 2022 back, just as long as we implement some new technology, or produce some new syllabus statement, or regale our adoring and compliant students with the “forklift at the gym” metaphor just one more time, is selling them an attractive lie.” - Clay Sharky 

 Blame AI.

If, on the other hand, this change leads to better student engagement in our present moment, something important will be gained.

How will this work? I don’t know. I am not teaching any introductory Biblical Studies courses this semester, so I can postpone decisions on course design for a couple more months. And I haven’t decided how to adjust larger 300-level courses open to all majors (another 2nd semester question).

Dealing with AI is, as Clay Sharky puts it, a “wicked problem” that will take time to solve:

“Faculty do not need to become experts in AI, but they do need to develop opinions about AI informed by their own areas of expertise, and they need to spell it out in the syllabus. We are the ones who have to do this work. ... [N]ow is not the time for purity in our approach. It is not critical that we develop a unified strategy. .... Now is the time for trying something and its opposite at the same time, then talking about what works and what doesn’t.” - Clay Sharky, “AI Is a ‘Wicked Problem.’”

Prayer appreciated. 

For earlier posts about AI, see:

• On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores (13 April 2025) 
• More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing (29 June 2025) 
• An AI-Free Zone (1 Sept 2025) 
• An AI Commonplace Part I: Diagnosing the Problem (30 August 2026) 

 

 

An AI Commonplace Part I: Diagnosing the Problem

“[W]hen we let a computer think for us, we put a gun to the head of civilisation.” - Katherine Rundell

Here are a few links to, and quotations from, articles and essays I’ve found helpful as I prepare to attempt yet again to persuade my students not to use AI in their assignments, and to explain to friends and colleagues inside and outside academia why AI is such a threat. 

It’s one thing to use AI when you are over 40 and know how to think for yourself, quite another when your job is to teach students how to think:

“A formed mind can argue or wrangle with the machine, reject its false polish and recognize when the language it constructs to redescribe the world has become too smooth or soulless. Someone who has lived with words long enough can sense when a sentence has not been earned, and someone who has already developed a voice can use the machine without allowing the machine to become the voice. … We do not wait for children to turn 16 to hand them car keys because cars are evil, and we do not insist that surgeons train for years because scalpels are immoral. We build thresholds around powerful things because power requires judgment, and judgment can’t be downloaded or installed. Before a person asks a machine to write for her, she should know what it feels like to write from the depths of her own uncertainty and identity. Before a person lets a machine imitate her voice, she should have endured the long, uneven, often humiliating process of acquiring one.” - Debbie Millman in the NYTimes

I’m no Luddite, but I’m here to tell you that when it comes to education in the Humanities, there is no upside to Artificial Intelligence:

• “The problem with writing with A.I. is that it’s mentally enfeebling — an escalator toward a result when you really need to make a daily habit of taking the stairs. As it becomes ubiquitous, it undermines not only our individual ability to write but also a society’s collective ability to reason, a culture’s inner capacity to create and everyone’s reason to care.” - Bret Stephens in the NYTimes
• “AI … risks becoming an iron curtain that comes down between a young person and their potential for thinking, for experiment and conquering frustration, for stamina and for invention – and thereby, between the young people and their freedom. It risks halting learning before it can take flight. Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. … We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.” - Katherine Rundell in the Guardian (read the whole thing)
• “It might be ‘cool’ or ‘innovative’ to teach students to summarize readings with ChatGPT or write essays with Claude. But we may be doing them a disservice: reducing their ability to retain material, think creatively, and reason from what they know. If you only read what AI has summarized for you, you don’t truly ‘know’ the material.” - Sally Sharif

There is a reason why the law school at University of California (Berkeley) has adopted a default policy that bans most uses of AI, that the University of Toronto’s law school is moving to make some courses “laptop free,” and that the University of Chicago has banned “technology in class and AI assistance on coursework” in all of its sociology core courses.

Unfortunately, simply banning AI is not enough. ChatGPT was released in November 2022, when most incoming college and university students were in grade 9. Many if not most first-year students will have used AI throughout high school. The technology is now everywhere and hard to resist:

• “In the first couple years of generative AI, many of us assumed that if we offered students good ways of using these tools, they would adopt those and forgo the lazy ones. Recent studies suggest that many students do neither. Instead, research has confirmed our worries and named them — cognitive offloading, cognitive debt, cognitive surrender, automation bias, illusion of competence, moral disengagement — a menagerie of threats we haven’t been able to protect our students from, or convince them to protect themselves from. If anything, our original concerns were understated.” - Clay Sharky, “AI Is a ‘Wicked Problem’”
• Students are under “enormous pressure to use AI or fall behind those who are.” “They used AI because it was there, because their classmates use it, because they fear if they don’t use it they’ll fall behind, because some professors ask them to and some tell them not to and some look away and some can’t see it when it’s literally right in front of them.” - Jeff Sharlet, “My Students Hate AI. But They Can’t Stop Using It.”
• “[W]e can no longer guarantee that the work students give us is the product of their own minds. Friends at universities around the UK optimistically tell me that they can tell when their students are handing in AI-generated work. But I think we can’t, not from written work alone; for myself, I’m only sure that I can tell when a young person is using AI badly.”” - Katherine Rundell
• “[T]he only reliable pattern I see is this: Whatever evidence faculty learn to trust as proof that a student did the work, a product appears to counterfeit it.” - Susan E. Ray, “The Next Wave of AI-Cheating Technology”

There is a reason why faculty members are demoralized, grieving, and retiring early.

So much for the problem. I outline possible responses here.

For earlier posts about AI, see:

• On Creativity, ChatGPT, and Doing Your Chores (13 April 2025) 
• More on AI, Student Learning and Human Flourishing (29 June 2025) 
• An AI-Free Zone (1 Sept 2025) 

 

Jewish Backgrounds Online

Jewish Backgrounds to Early Christianity, a course I get to teach every second year, is being offered this fall through Briercrest Seminary with an online option. As with Hebrew, most students in this hybrid course will be in person. Online students will join the rest of the class over Zoom (Tues / Thurs 12:25-1:40 pm CST).

Here is the calendar course description: 

An introduction to the history, literature, and thought of early Judaism (from 300 BCE to 200 CE). This course highlights the Jewish origins of Christianity, illuminates the thought world of Jesus and his Jewish contemporaries, and explores the reasons for the eventual “parting of ways” between Judaism and Christianity.

If you have ever wanted to know about ancient Jewish texts that didn’t make it into the Protestant canon or wondered what happened during the so-called “400-silent years,” the course may be of interest.

 A copy of the syllabus is available at this link.

 

 

Hybrid Hebrew at Briercrest

I am happy to announce two new developments in Briercrest College and Seminary’s “Living Language” Biblical Hebrew program.

(1) Semi-Intensive Format: This year for the first time we are offering our four-course (12 credit hour) Hebrew sequence in one year instead of two. Imagine beginning class in September at “Shalom!” and ending in April with a reading knowledge of Biblical Hebrew.

(2) Hybrid Option: We are opening enrolment to online students who will be able to join on-campus students over Zoom in our state-of-the-art hybrid classroom.

Our courses are ABHE and ATS-accredited, so if you are looking to complete language requirements at Briercrest or another college or seminary, but are not able to relocate to our campus in Saskatchewan, you can take all four courses online from the comfort of your home. (For my part, I can’t imagine why anyone interested in the Bible or considering pastoral ministry wouldn’t jump at the chance!)

A Note on our Communicative Approach: At Briercrest, we teach the biblical languages using a communicative or “living language” approach. Among other things, this means class will be conducted, as far as possible, in Biblical Hebrew. Students will spend most of their time in class listening to Biblical Hebrew, and they will learn to speak Biblical Hebrew as well as to read and write it.

This “living language” approach is different from how Biblical Hebrew has traditionally been taught in North America. In conventional language classes, the majority of class time is spent talking about Hebrew in English; students labour over analysing word forms, memorizing vocabulary by rote, and producing their own English translations. The traditional grammar-translation approach appeals only to a small percentage of analytical learners and even at the best of times tends to result in a superficial understanding about how the language works, not a knowledge of the language itself. (There is a reason why most students who study Hebrew in seminary do not succeed in maintaining a long-term reading knowledge of the language!) Our active communicative approach to learning Hebrew is geared to the way people naturally learn languages and results in much more exposure to the language. As a result, it leads to deeper and longer-lasting learning; it also appeals to a wider range of learning styles—and is more fun! (For more detail on this approach as it relates to Ancient Greek, see this post and follow the links back.)

Course Details and Fine Print:

• During the fall semester, classes will run M/T/W/Th at 10:40-11:55 a.m. and F, 1:00-2:15 p.m. CST.
• Homework expectations: Learning any language requires a significant time commitment. You should expect to invest @ 2 hours of homework / class. Most of the homework will consist of watching or listening to the outstanding resources produced by the Biblical Language Center (now part of Whole Word Institute). I can’t promise you a walk in the park; I can assure you that if you put in the time, you will have fun and you will learn.
• Most of the students in the class will be in-person on-campus. The hybrid model with an online option is a pilot project that will require sufficient online enrolment to proceed.

For more information, contact me.

 

Voices on the Liberal Arts (Cont'd): The Scholarship of Teaching

If, as I asserted in my previous post, the study of the humanities—history, literature, philosophy—is vital for the repair of our decadent western society and for the reform of the church, how might one go about reclaiming its historic position at the core of a college or university curriculum? 

Jennifer Frey defines the study of the liberal arts as “a kind of learning that is the cultivation of the higher capacities in a person and the cultivation of those capacities as it were for its own sake, because it is good and important to cultivate them because we’re human.” The problem, according to Frey, “is that we have lost our ability to understand the intrinsic value of engaging in that sort of self-cultivation.”

In a 2018 essay, “Higher Education Is Drowning in BS,” Christian Smith spreads the blame around. From his long list, which you should read if you can access the essay behind the Chronicle of Higher Education’s paywall, I mention two: 

“BS is the university’s loss of capacity to grapple with life’s Big Questions, because of our crisis of faith in truth, reality, reason, evidence, argument, civility, and our common humanity. … BS is the failure of leaders in higher education to champion the liberal-arts ideal — that college should challenge, develop, and transform students’ minds and hearts so they can lead good, flourishing, and socially productive lives — and their stampeding into the “practical” enterprise of producing specialized workers to feed The Economy.”

Smith attributes many of society’s ills to higher education’s BS problem:

“Ideas and their accompanying practices have consequences. What is formed in colleges and universities over decades shows up for better or worse in the character and quality of our public servants, political campaigns, public-policy debates, citizen participation, social capital, media programming, lower school education, consumer preferences, business ethics, entertainments, and much more. And the long-term corrosive effects on politics and culture can also be repaired only over the long term, if ever. There are no quick fixes here. So I do not speak in hyperbole by saying that our accumulated academic BS puts at risk decent civilization itself.

What is needed, Smith suggests, is a thorough-going clean-up operation:

“Many thoughtful people in higher education today are well aware of different piles of BS around them. Fewer seem to recognize the magnitude of the mounds of it that have accumulated and how badly they defile us. … In my view, genuinely positive changes in higher education, if they ever do happen, will have to combine some forms of visionary traditionalism and organizational radicalism. We will need people with the capacity to retrieve and revitalize the best of higher education’s past and restructure it organizationally in ways that are most effective in the future.”

Ben Sasse, echoing the sentiments in Smith’s essay, blames those responsible for teaching the liberal arts:

“So many universities have had liberal arts colleges captured by ideological activists that really only want to speak to eight or 10 or 17 other ideological activists …. Their power … is increasingly just to compel students to take their classes through the core curriculum. But the classes aren’t very good. They aren’t very big, they aren’t very rigorous. They aren’t big in terms of grand questions. They’re not trying to help people fall in love with the good, the true and the beautiful.”

William Deresiewicz suggests the answer is to recenter teaching at the core of the university’s mission:

“Most college teaching is mediocre at best and often far worse. … Under the research model, faculty are incentivized to do a single thing only: create knowledge. Publish or perish. When good teaching happens, it happens by accident, and often at a cost to one’s career. … [I]f general education is going to be resuscitated—and undergraduate education in general improved, and academia despised a little less—colleges and universities need to start seeing themselves, to an extent they never have before, as teaching institutions.”

There is reason for hope. Deresiewicz’s ideal appears already to exist at St. John’s College, an American liberal arts college that adopted a Great Books curriculum in 1937. I quote from a recent profile of St. John’s College published (behind a paywall) in the Chronicle of Higher Education: 

“The tiny campus offers only one undergraduate major. It has no cutting-edge disciplines or high-tech classrooms. In fact, none of the trappings of modern teaching exist here. Instead students make their way in tandem through a series of texts — most of them foundational to the disciplines — over four years together. The cornerstone is the annual seminar. But students also take four years of math, two of Greek, two of French, two of music, and three of science. St. John’s approach may be unfashionable, but the college has something that many envy: a student body that strives to grow intellectually, embraces ambiguity, and revels in deep reading"

“While there is a tenure process, there are no departments, electives, or expectations that faculty members conduct research …. Tutors [i.e., faculty members] are expected to teach all subjects at some point in their time at St. John’s. As a result, they are fellow learners — reading foundational works and teaching courses in sequence, just as their students take them. … Preparing for class is time-consuming because most subjects are outside tutors’ areas of expertise. Even if you taught the same course before ... you have to prepare as if you haven’t. Because classes are discussion driven, you don’t control where the conversation will go.”

The University of Tulsa honors college that Jennifer Frey helped create was envisaged as a “mini St. John’s.” According to Frey, the program “was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms.” It was also a financial and numerical success: “we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum” as well as “major financial gifts.” Unfortunately, the University of Tulsa’s new administration did not share her vision and the program was gutted two years after it got off the ground. Frey concludes: 

“The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.”

  Coda

(1) What about the cost? It is fair to say the voices I’ve been listening to on the liberal arts are insiders—liberal arts believers operating within or adjacent to the North American higher education system. And it is fair to wonder how much of the conversation about the importance of the liberal arts is self-serving or at least solipsistic. To take one example, the conversation tends not to talk about the financial cost of getting a traditional liberal arts education. Do conversation participants just assume that everyone (who matters) will go to college or university anyway?

(2) Keeping the Faith: I am a liberal arts believer. I am also, and more importantly, a Christian believer. Where can one go to get a solid liberal arts education that is not held hostage by ideologues or actively destructive to Christian faith?

(3) I note in passing that the Christian college where I teach has a fairly robust Arts & Science core, and offers a 4-year BA degree in English, a 3-year Bachelor in General Studies with a strong humanities emphasis, and a one-year certificate in Arts & Science. If you include Biblical Studies (my own field) and Theology, as I do, your liberal arts degree options increase, and the liberal arts core is strong indeed.

(4) The Liberal Arts and liberalism: You won’t find Briercrest advertising itself as a “liberal arts” college, partly because our constituency hears the word “liberal” and worries that the school has strayed from its evangelical Bible college roots. For the record, (a) “liberal arts” does not mean or require liberalism in any sense; (b) Briercrest has not abandoned small-e evangelicalism or its emphasis on the Bible and Christian ministry. 

 

“Don’t Move to a Mental Slum”: Voices I’m Listening to on the Liberal Arts

I have been paying attention to conversations about the liberal arts lately in an attempt to think through why I feel so strongly about the importance of getting a liberal arts education. How do I convince a skeptical eighteen year old that studying the humanities—history, literature, philosophy—is worth it regardless of one’s eventual career? How do I explain to people in my faith tradition why the North American evangelical church desperately needs the liberal arts if it is to avoid the contemporary idolatries of the left and the right?

Here are a few of the voices I’ve found helpful:

Ben Sasse: Everyone should watch, listen to, or read Ross Douthat’s interview with Ben Sasse, the former US Senator, former president of the University of Florida, and committed Christian who is dying of pancreatic cancer. Along the way, Sasse talks about the role of the academy in (American) society:

“Academia’s a total mess, obviously. And yet we need institutions to help people go from being 15 to 17 to 19 to 21. You have to do home leaving, you have to do family formation, you have to do first job, you have to do a ton of habit and character formation stuff. Higher education could be a really, really useful transitional institution. Right now, it enables lots of endlessly deferred adolescent behaviors and not enough rigor and not enough clarity about either research or teaching or character formation. … The answer is not to hate on the liberal arts. The answer is to recover the liberal arts. … But I think the 101 question is: What is the best use of 45 months of an 18- to 22-year-old’s time? Why would we compel people to do anything? It better dang well benefit them and benefit the broader society in terms of the economic output they’re going to produce, but more importantly, the civic engagement that they’re going to be able to have and the love of neighbor and the engagement with a republic — a small-r republic of pluralists who say, ‘We don’t want a polity that’s based on power, we want a whole bunch of people who want to flourish and thrive and build great things in their community.’ And that requires you to be acquainted with some of the wonderful ideas and with beauty in the past — and most of that is way more interesting than anything that is political.” 

“We should be preparing the mind and the character for all of the various vocations and callings in life — and to be prepared for the first job, but also for the third job in an industry that doesn’t even exist yet and won’t for 15 or 20 years.”

Jennifer Frey: Ross Douthat also interviews Jennifer Frey, who was fired without cause from her role as the inaugural dean of what was a successful great books Honors College at the University of Tulsa. In a viral New York Times opinion piece, Frey describes the program this way:

“Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. … At the Honors College, we taught our students that wisdom is a distant goal, and that we need to work on ourselves as we try to approach it. We need to cultivate what our college called ‘the virtues of liberal learning.’ For example, we need to cultivate the humility to recognize that we have much to learn from the past and from one another. We need to cultivate a love of truth for its own sake and the courage to speak our minds and to follow the truth wherever it may lead us — even when it leads us into difficult waters where our disagreements are deep and unsettling. When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it.”

David Foster Wallace: In his famous, “This is Water” 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, David Foster Wallace argued that the point of a liberal arts education is not learning how to think but learning what to think about: 

“[L]et’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about ‘teaching you how to think.’ If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think …. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. … I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. … The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

To be sure, you don’t have to get a degree in the liberal arts to cultivate attention, self-discipline, and the ability to care about other people, but it can help.

Susan Sontag: The title of this post comes from a 1983 Susan Sontag commencement address, now dated in its second-wave feminism, but still worth reading for her comments on the importance of the liberal arts and her concluding peroration:

“Perhaps the most useful suggestion I can make on the day when most of you are ceasing to be students, is that you go on being students—for the rest of your lives. Don’t move to a mental slum. … Keep on reading. … Lay off the television. And, remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don’t have time any more to read—or listen to music, or look at painting, or go to the movies, or do whatever feeds you head now—then you’re getting old. That means they got to you, after all.”

If you have read this far, do yourself a favour and watch Jerry Seinfeld’s rag on “passion” in his 2024 Duke commencement address: 

 HT: Melissa Kirsch

  

Josephus and Jewish Ethnonyms

I am pleased to report that a pre-print version of my long article, “Josephus and Jewish Ethnonyms: Restoration Eschatology or Jewish Antiquity?” has appeared online at the Journal for the Study of Judaism website.

The article is framed as a response to the use Jason Staples makes of the ancient Jewish historian, Josephus, in his book, The Idea of Israel in Second Temple Judaism: A New Theory of People, Exile, and Israelite Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2021). In a nutshell, I agree with Staples that Josephus links the term Ioudaios (usually translated ‘Jew’ or ‘Judean’) to the tribe of Judah, but disagree that Josephus’ adoption of Ioudaios as the standard term for his people at the midpoint of his massive Jewish Antiquities has anything to do with a sense of ongoing exile or a hope for the restoration of the northern tribes of Israel.

In addition to responding to parts of Staples’ important monograph, I’d like to think the article makes its own contribution to our understanding of Josephus, in the first place by defending one of Staples’ main points about Josephus, which might otherwise be neglected; second, by critiquing Staples’ case for restoration eschatology in Josephus; and, finally, by highlighting how Josephus’ introduction of Ioudaios as a new name contributes to his defense of the Ioudaioi by way of a polemical opposition to the Samaritans. (There is also a close reading of sections of Antiquities book 11 and an exploration of Josephus’ ‘geography of exile’—his understanding of the boundaries of Babylon, Media and Persia—and what it implies about where Josephus thought the inhabitants of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah were exiled.)

The article has had a long gestation period and has incurred debts along the way. I would like to acknowledge some of them here: I presented an early version of the essay at the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies in May of 2023, and a revised version at a faculty colloquium at my home institution in January 2024. I thank Briercrest for a semester sabbatical in 2025 that gave me time to finish the essay, and the other Dr. Miller for reading and talking about it more than she wanted to. Incisive, detailed and critical feedback from two anonymous reviewers for JSJ resulted in a much better, clearer (and longer) final product. I am also grateful to Staples himself: I learned a great deal from interacting with his work.

For anyone interested in more detail, here are the thesis and outline paragraphs:

The re-examination of Josephus’ ethnic terminology in this article confirms and reinforces one of Staples’ major points. When in Antiquities 11 Ioudaios first begins to be used as a common label, the term is in fact closely associated with the southern kingdom of Judah. I am not persuaded, however, by Staples’ additional claims that Ioudaios consistently refers to a subset of “all Israel” or that the shift from “Hebrews” and “Israelites” to Ioudaioi in Antiquities 11 reflects Josephus’ restoration eschatology. The point of introducing the label, Ioudaios, at the return from exile in Babylon is not to contrast southern kingdom Ioudaioi, on the one hand, and northern kingdom “Israelites” still in exile beyond the Euphrates, on the other. Nor is it to express hope for a still future restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel. When Josephus adopts Ioudaios as his preferred ethnonym and explains its connection to the tribe of Judah, his goal is to establish continuity between contemporary Ioudaioi and the past history of his people in the context of a wider polemical contrast with the Samaritans, whose claim to Israelite ancestry he regards as illegitimate. Once the antiquity of the label and the people it designates is validated, its meaning expands to encompass the whole people regardless of current location or tribal ancestry.

I begin by tracing the use of ethnonyms in Josephus’ paraphrase of the preexilic period (Ant. 1-10), noting that his preferred term for the people as a whole before the exile is “Hebrews,” that Ioudaios seldom appears, and that “Israelites” can designate the people as a whole or the northern tribes, as “Israel” does in his biblical source texts. The two established meanings of “Israelite” complicate attempts to determine whether Josephus presents the Ioudaioi as opposed to the Israelites, a subset of the Israelites, or synonymous with the Israelites. This ambiguity is the subject of sections two and three. Section two examines Josephus’ own explanation of the postexilic origins of Ioudaios and its links to the “tribe of Judah” (Ant. 11.173), and then explores his understanding of the regions where the northern and southern tribes were relocated by the Assyrians and Babylonians. Section three employs what Josephus says about Babylonia, Media and Persia as a diagnostic tool to help determine the meaning of “Israelite” and its relationship to Ioudaios in the first half of Antiquities 11. Although it is not always possible to identify the referent of “Israelite” in book 11, Josephus’ use of “Israelite” and Ioudaios does not point to a separation between Ioudaioi and “all Israel” when the southern tribes return from exile. Instead, the continued use of “Israelite” during the return narrative connects the Ioudaioi to their preexilic past. The next two sections challenge Staples’ claim that Josephus’ adoption of Ioudaios implicitly draws attention to the absence of the northern tribes. Section four argues that Josephus identified the end of exile with possession of the land and temple, not the return of all twelve tribes. References to “Israelites” or members of the “ten tribes” beyond the Euphrates do not, therefore, reflect Josephus’ restoration hope; nor does a sense of ongoing exile explain the shift to Ioudaios. Section five shows that, despite its initial connections to the southern kingdom of Judah, the term Ioudaios expands in scope in Antiquities 12-20, becoming, in effect, a postexilic replacement for “Israelite” and “Hebrew.” A concluding section attributes Josephus’ decision to switch to Ioudaios to his own reading of his biblical source texts, and suggests that he attempted to introduce the name into his narrative in a way that confirmed his people’s antiquity.

You can view the abstract here. Update: I have uploaded a post-peer review copy of the manuscript on my website here.

Finally, I tried to present Staples’ position accurately. Staples evidently thinks I failed to do so. So … if you wish to pursue the topic further, I recommend reading Staples’ book as well as my own essay. Let the conversation continue. 

 

The Sisters of Sinai on Learning Ancient Greek as a Living Language

I recently finished reading Janet Soskice’s biography of the twin sister scholars, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, who in their 50’s joined the ranks of the world’s finest Western scholars of Syriac and Arabic, discovered one of the most important manuscripts of the Gospels, the Syriac Sinaiticus, and played an instrumental role in Solomon Schechter’s discovery of the Cairo Geniza.

All this was due, Soskice suggests, to the sisters’ decision to learn ancient Greek as a living language. As children, Agnes and Margaret’s father had made a deal: Learn a foreign language, and we’ll travel to that country. “On this happy plan, and with a twin as a constant practice partner, the sisters mastered French, German, Spanish and Italian while still quite young” (9).

When their father died suddenly in 1866—leaving “his twenty-three-year-old daughters entirely alone in the world, and very rich” (21)—Agnes and Margaret celebrated his memory by traveling up the Nile (in 1869) and determining to learn Arabic.

A decade later, in 1879, the still-single sisters, “threw themselves into the study of [ancient] Greek, … imposing on themselves the discipline of speaking only Greek to each other for days at a time” (56). Instead of the medieval pronunciation system reconstructed by Erasmus, the sisters adopted the current modern Greek pronunciation, following the advice of J. S. Blackie, Professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh. This enabled them to kill two birds with one stone: By 1883 the sisters, “now quite fluent in Greek,” had embarked on a tour of Greece, which resulted in Agnes’s second published travel memoir (56-57).

Marriage intervened for both sisters in the 1880’s. Margaret was married to James Gibson for three years before his untimely death in 1886. Agnes was married to Samuel Lewis for just over three years before his untimely death in 1891. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, “to lose one spouse, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

“[O]nly a couple months after Samuel’s death,” Agnes read that J. Rendel Harris had discovered a complete copy of the Apology of Aristides in Syriac at St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai peninsula. “Agnes was so interested in this book that she began to study Syriac—not so difficult, she said, if one already had Hebrew and Arabic” (101).

“In January of 1892, less than nine months after Samuel’s death, Agnes and Margaret were in Cairo.” The sisters were able to secure permission from the Archbishop of Sinai to visit St. Catherine’s Monastery “not least because he had, early in their interview, formed the impression that the twins were on a mission to convert the whole of England to the correct pronunciation of Greek” (114). Once at the monastery, they befriended the Greek-speaking monks and were soon granted access to the monastery’s Syriac manuscripts, one of which turned out to be the Sinaitic Palimpsest, the oldest extant Old Syriac manuscript of the Gospels.

Back in Cambridge in 1893—and simplifying a more dramatic story—the 50-year-old sisters “threw themselves into the study of Syriac” (191). By 1894, “[a]fter what must count as one of the most remarkable of middle-aged retraining exercises, Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson stepped onto the world stage as oriental scholars of international repute” (200).

Quotations from Janet Soskice, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: Vintage, 2010).

John Wesley on Clergy, Learning and the Biblical Languages

“Men in general are under a great mistake with regard to what is called ‘the learned world.’ They do not know, they cannot easily imagine, how little learning there is among them. I do not speak of abstruse learning, but of what all divines, at least of any note, are supposed to have, viz., the knowledge of the tongues, at least Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and of the common arts and sciences. How few men of learning, so called, understand Hebrew? Even so far as to read a plain chapter in Genesis? Nay, how few understand Greek? Make an easy experiment. Desire that grave man who is urging this objection only to tell you the English of the first paragraph that occurs in one of Plato’s Dialogues. I am afraid we may go farther still. How few understand Latin? Give one of them an Epistle of Tully [Cicero], and see how readily he will explain it, without his dictionary. … And with regard to the arts and sciences: how few understand so much as the general principles of logic? Can one in ten of the clergy (O grief of heart!) or of the Masters of Arts in either university, when an argument is brought, tell you even the mood and figure wherein it is proposed? Or complete an enthymeme? … Can one in ten of them demonstrate a problem or theorem in Euclid’s Elements? or define the common terms used in metaphysics?”

John Wesley, Appeals to Men of Reason and Religion (1743, 1745) as quoted in Stephen Westerholm and Martin Westerholm, Reading Sacred Scripture: Voices from the History of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2016), 290 note 39.

Looking up Hebrew Words in the Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) Lexicon Online

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: 

 

A 2025 Reading Retrospective

 

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.