You've got to watch what you blog about. I was warned recently about admitting that I've seen movies like Eyes Wide Shut, depending on where I hope to get a job later. Fair enough. But this one caught me by complete surprise.

A recent first-time visitor to this blog, from Saudi Arabia (!), got here by a Yahoo search for "lolita childs."

Naturally, this site, for all it talks about Childs, came near the top of the list (I mentioned reading Nabokov's book a few weeks back). If the man comes back looking, tell him I've never heard of her.

On a related note, Phil put me on to a recent news item that is similarly "by turns disturbing, sad, and hilarious." Free train travel anyone? Make sure to read to the end.

Finally, a word about my choice to designate all this as humor. I grant that it is dark humor at best, probably closer to horror. But as a genre horror has often flirted with comedy (I must credit Phil again for reminding me). If you think there's nothing even remotely comic about these very real episodes, then I predict you also did not at all enjoy Colbert's presentation at the White House correspondents' dinner.

If any of this rankles you, I dare you to post the first comment in ages.

Tags: Humor

Martin Amis reminded me recently that good reviews stand on their own. You do not have to read Harold Bloom on the Jahwist before you can appreciate Chris Seitz's response. Pacy frequently points to superficiality, but not always, as Seitz gives us occasion to observe:

The disturbing superficiality of the discussion here and at other points gives the book a kind of "sound-bite" quality, like a half-hour TV program on how to perform brain surgery.

Read (and enjoy) the full review to find out how complex questions of theological exegesis can be as much as to see how The Book of J, "at the cost of slaying both Moses and God," purchases "a Yahwist who turns out to be nothing more than the mirror image of two clever 20th-century readers."

Tags: PhD

This site news pertains not just to this site, but to a great many sites.

I love RapidWeaver. This is the fourth or fifth website I've built, and it's not only the one I like best; it's by far the easiest to update and maintain. And I absolutely could not have made it (or at least, not without making it a full-time job, which would be a mistake) without RapidWeaver. Those of you who have read my software page will already know this.

The reason we have news is because serious RapidWeaver users are anticipating a fairly major upgrade this Friday, from 3.2.1 to 3.5. If you've been thinking of starting your own page, or you have one and you aren't committed to your software, here's why you should buy RapidWeaver today:

1. Today RapidWeaver costs $34.95. Friday it will cost $39.95. But the upgrade is free. Buy today and save five bucks.
2. I've only had two objections to RapidWeaver—no PermaLinks, and formatting disappears when you cut and paste—and they'll both disappear on Friday. (Read about some of the new features.)

And here are two more general reasons why you should buy into RapidWeaver.

1. Even if you already have iWeb—yes, all this assumes you operate a Mac—RapidWeaver is several generations ahead of the iApp that tried to take its place, even before Friday. Integration with iPhoto or .Mac is every bit as convenient.
2. Supporting small software developers is probably a good in itself, but it becomes fun when you also get the best product in its class on the market.

IWER types, you'll pardon me if I toast a software firm at Friday's event.

Tags: Mac

I've been working on annotating a select bibliography of Childs' work. I've chosen five books. You can read why here.

Check out the IWER Events Blog for details on an event this Friday.

My supervisor, Nathan MacDonald, has an article by this title in the latest issue of Vetus Testamentum (the journal, not the site). Here's an abstract:

It is generally accepted that the first speech of Moses in Deuteronomy (i 1-iv 40) is not of one piece, and that a clear distinction needs to be recognized between the rhetorical parenesis of chapter iv and the narrative recapitulation in chapters i-iii. This analysis has even proved determinative for scholars interested in the final form of the biblical text, despite the recognition that the chapters are portrayed canonically as Moses's first speech. A lack of substantive thematic connections between the two parts of the speech prevents any attempt to trace unity across the whole. This article argues that the consensus on the literary history of these chapters may be more problematic than commonly thought. Further, it is proposed that common to both the narrative and the parenetic sections of Moses's first speech are the complex interrelationship between the themes of divine presence, human obedience, election and the land.

If you or yours has a subscription to Vetus Testamentum, you can read the full article here.

Tags: PhD

Between helping a friend move into a new apartment, answering emails and completing other tasks for the upcoming Hebrews Conference, I've been attending to the finer details of this redesigned site. There's a little more artwork here and there. And some of the content has been updated and/or rearranged. I've tried to make the URL's sensible, and I think I can continue to tweak them without affecting their addresses.

FYI, two domain names will redirect you to this space. First, www.danieldriver.com takes you to this blog. Secondly, www.vetustestamentum.com lands you at my start page.

There are other additions in the wings, such as a searchable bibliography. I'll announce specific improvements when they get up and running.

Thanks to RapidWeaver and Rapid-Ideas, it only took one day to effect a complete website overhaul. And I spent most of that time looking for the right four images on sites like BildIndex and the Web Gallery of Art.

Like it? Bonus points if you can pick out the theme (more specific than "paintings").

I've incorporated another 20 reviews into the online Childs bibliography, all of which have links to full text through JSTOR. I'll update the PDF file to include the new reviews by the end of the day.

The final results are:

Books: 4 of 12 online (33%)
Articles: 19 of 58 online (32%)
Reviews: 60 of 72 online (83%)

Hopefully others out there will find this resource useful. Happy reading!

Tags: Childs

I updated the Childs bibliography to reflect all the titles by Childs that are available online. So far I know of four books and four articles. Please let me know if you find others!

UPDATE: So there's far more Childs online than I ever imagined! So far I've got 4 books, 12 articles, and 33 reviews. New links to all of this are now up. Check it out, then, if you're working on Childs, thank me profusely. Or if you notice any omissions or mistakes, let me know.

UPDATE: OK, this is getting insane. I now have four books, nineteen articles, and forty (!) reviews. The reviews are particularly impressive. As far as I know, the last review Childs wrote was in 1992, and the first was in 1958. I count 52 reviews here, which means 77% of his reviews are online. Did I say that was before 1992?! Along the way, I discovered about a dozen other reviews that I had not know about (I'll post them tomorrow). That will push the final mark for reviews online to 81%. Who are these people!?

Tags: PhD

I was browsing the online text of the three SEAD essays (see previous post), and I soon discovered that the online text is not always identical to the printed text.

For example, "Sheer rot!" is deleted from third-to-last paragraph of the essay "Discrete Witness" in the printed edition (p62). It would be interesting to know if there were other such omissions!

Tags: PhD

For a while now I've lamented the loss of three papers Childs gave in 1997, which until recently had been available online. They have been printed in a volume titled The Rule of Faith:


Though I now own this volume, it's convenient to have the text in a searchable format. Today (I don't know why not before) it finally occurred to me to look on the WayBack Machine. Sure enough, the essays are still there. If you're interested, browse the full text of:

Childs, Brevard. "Jesus Christ the Lord and the Scriptures of the Church." Pages 1-12 in Rule of Faith. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishers, 1998.
———. "The Nature of the Christian Bible: One Book, Two Testaments." Pages 115-125 in Rule of Faith. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishers, 1998.
———. "The One Gospel in Four Witnesses." Pages 51-62 in Rule of Faith. Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishers, 1998.

I've updated the Childs bibliography with the same links. They're all on the same page, so you'll have to scroll down for two and three.

I was also pleased to see that other essays by three St Mary's professors are there, too, by Chris Seitz, Richard Bauckham, and Trevor Hart.

Tags: PhD

James Luther Mays has been (among other things) reviewing Childs for a long time. He has a review of IOTS in the HBT volume of 1980, and as I've just discovered, he also has a review of Childs' 2004 Struggle which is available online. Read the review here.

To select just one comment:

It is obvious from the structure of the book that in Childs’ view the principal issues and practices of Christian hermeneutics were developed in the patristic period, debated and refined in the medieval, and blurred in the modern as the genre of the literature as scripture began to lose its defining role in the presuppositions of its interpreters.

I especially agree with the first clause. I think Childs gets his hermeneutic from the patristic period very early on—at least by 1972—and I also think most of his critics still fail to see the full significance of this. That's what I'll be arguing, anyway.

While I'm at it, here are two other online reviews of Struggle, via RBL: see here and here.

Tags: PhD

I also just discovered that Mark Brett's and Paul Noble's books about Childs are available at Google Books, too. I'm preparing to write on these titles. The other major reconstruction of Childs, by Steins, is not available online. However, if your German's up to speed you can see an article he wrote after the book which summarizes the main points, here.

Tags: PhD

I've been working on James Barr's criticisms of Childs this week. (If you lecture at St Mary's and just had The Concept of Biblical Theology recalled from you, now you know by whom. Sorry!)

No comments yet, apart from referring you to my earlier post on Jon Levenson's review. I'm happy, though, to be at the place in Barr's career where his books are available online! How convenient to run a search like this.

If your institution has access to Oxford Scholarship Online, you can search his titles here and here.

Update: After poking around online, I also found a brief biography for Barr (useful), and a 'fundamentalist' putting him to use (ironic).

Tags: Barr

I've updated my Start page, complete with a new title for the site which was partly suggested to me by Phil: the Daniel Driver Visitor's Information Bureau. Up to now I haven't really had a title, so the nondescript links I've got from some sites as simply "DRD Blog" are my own fault. May I also draw your attention to the fact that you can get here by directing the browser of your choice to: http://www.danieldriver.com/.

I think I finally get around to updating the look of the site, too, which I've been thinking about for some time now.

Question (completely unrelated): do American mothers living in the UK expect to have mother's day celebrated two times?

If you haven't made up your mind yet about Stephen Colbert's stunt in DC, this piece by Troy of Slate Magazine may help you see it as "good political satire." You can even listen to the author read it to you if you like.

If you didn't know Colbert before, you may appreciate his humor better in its usual context. A favorite clip of mine on YouTube pertains to my home state.

Tags: Humor

Add this to your list of books that will never be written: Nabokov's Lolita and The Holiness Code: An Intertextual Study of a "Parody of Incest" and Leviticus18.

I had to hole up last week in our humble flat after I contracted an acute case of something-or-another. I managed to do a little work, but eventually I gave myself permission to pick up a novel instead of John Barton. Lolita turns out to be a good book to read when afflicted.

It is my first literary read since we moved to Scotland almost two years ago. I did pick up Ulysses last summer when we went to Dublin but failed to make it any further than the last time I tried to read it. And Adriel and I read the 6th Harry Potter to each other when it came out. But apart from that, Lolita was the first. The experience makes me nostalgic for my undergraduate days as a lit major.

Martin Amis put me on to the book. See an excerpt from the review I read in his The War Against Cliché (which I also recommended). Let his insights and well-chosen quotations stand in for what could have been a long-winded, less reflective post from me. I would only add one quote from the foreward:

"No doubt, [HH] is horrible, his is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous…"

Amis is the best guide, but there's a decent Wikipedia article (the Slate article it links is disappointing).

Tags: Literature

I was ill last week and haven't even really looked at email for some time (sorry friends, Hebrews conference types—you'll hear from me soon now). I'm plowing through well over a hundred today. But I have got a few new posts in mind, which I'll permit myself to write periodically for diversions.

Tags: Personal

There's a bit of St Andrews lore behind the anual May dip, where thousands of crazed (not always drunk) students jump into the North Sea at 5 AM. They say that if you step on the stones marking the place were martyr Patrick Hamilton was burned at the stake, you will not graduate.


One can fairly easily step on these stones if walking along North Street. Fortunately it is possible to make expiation on the first of May. All you have to do is jump into the North Sea at dawn.

That's the story anyway. People seem to go along for other reasons, though. Several friends took the plunge this year (photos posted here and here). For myself, I couldn't be bothered to get out of bed.

For the reflections of somebody who was actually there this year, see Meg's blog.

Tags: Humor, St Andrews