Jacob CeroneYou could tell I was one of them. The hole-punched cards hanging from a steel ring on my belt loop gave me away. I was an ancient language student. The cards were my flashcards, and I didn’t go anywhere without them: to class, to the student dining...
Ryan BurnsMy mom, an avid reader who often is in the middle of four books at the same time, once passed on some counsel to me: Don’t read good books, only great ones. The advice is both challenging and inherently futile; for how can you know if a book is...
Dating while you are in seminary can be a challenge. It looks different for each couple no doubt, with two people involved there is an endless amount of factors to what your relationship looks like while you are in seminary. Are you both in school...
Paul BurkhartI’ve written before of my love of the note-taking app Evernote. Today, I want to show some of the slightly deeper highlights to using this app in a seminary or ministry context. Note-Taking (Together?) This may seem obvious, but the best thing...
I’m terrible at organizing. Well, that’s not quite right. I can come up with brilliant systems of organization, but just never implement them. This has followed me throughout my life. It was easier when school consisted of clearly laid-out...
Faithlife StaffThis post is by Josh Westbury, a scholar-in-residence at Faithlife. In addition to being a Hall of Fame baseball player, Yogi Berra is perhaps remembered most for his pithy witticisms, affectionately known as “Yogi-isms”. These short sayings often...
John Calvin famously opened up his Institutes with a profound set of lines about the close intimacy between knowledge of God and knowledge of ourselves. He did not start with Scripture or hermeneutics, but anthropology. In the Protestant focus on...
I do these weekly Study Guides for our church home group leaders. I read a bunch of commentaries on the sermon text, and condense the scholarly thoughts into a 2 page verse-by-verse commentary our leaders can use to help answer people questions if...
I recently found myself looking, back through A.W. Tozer’s The Knowledge of the Holy and was reminded just how good of a book it is for seminarians to read every now and then. In a sermon preached by Tozer on God’s Holiness, he tells the...
Our daughter, Emery, was born on February 6th of this year. We’re finishing up our first year of seminary. Naturally my wife and I were the recipients of about as much advice as you can stomach. Everyone seemed to have their two cents, and if every...
We’ve talked before on this site about how seminary has changed. The days where all you need is a Bible, notebook, and a library card are over. There is a whole world of resources available, means to access them, ways to organize your time at...
By Rebecca Dobyns In seminary, Greek is always the subject everyone winces about. I have heard more “I’m sorry”s or “Have fun with that”s about taking Greek than about any other subject, except perhaps Hebrew. Granted, much of it is in jest, and...
Learning theology is one of the main purposes and joys of seminary. But through the course of your education there, you’re likely to have many of your proper theological convictions challenged, shaped, and changed. And yet, even as we’re going...
By Noah Myers Being out of college for three years before I started seminary it took me a bit before I could get back into the groove of schoolwork, online classes also proved a new challenge. All of that to say, I’ve learned a couple lessons...
Mark WardThe languages of the world are often represented in a family-tree diagram in which “parent” languages such as Proto-Slavic branch out into “child” languages such as Russian, Polish, and Croatian. Just as in real-life human lineages, the parents may...
I was somewhat surprised, after I posted about Jesus’ use of the diminutive κυνάριον in his delightful conversation with the Syrophoenician woman (Matt 15:26–27), to have several people make comments like this one: Was the historical Jesus really...
For our little family it is the inevitable season of attack, the month before moving our family of five across Country to Seminary. There are the weekends packed of visiting family, not living in our own home, my husband working in a separate state...
The newly updated New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis was updated because of the assiduous work of one man, Moisés Silva, whose work I have admired for a long time. Because of that admiration, I was both excited about...
Kris LyleI remember the first time I got a Hebrew lexicon. I was so eager to find the “real meaning” of important theological words. I quickly turned to ברך (barak) and קדשׁ (qadosh) only to find one-word glosses (“bless” and “holy,” respectively) that I had...
Most seminary degree programs have a required set of classes that the student must take in order to graduate. For instance, there is no way to get around that preaching class or Greek or Hebrew. However, many schools also allow students to customize...
I’m going to give you two sets of overlapping opinions on this issue, one set you should listen to and then my own set. This post is aiming mostly for the person who has no opinions on the issue, and was only dimly aware that opinions existed. You...
So you just finished your last Final and so begins your intersession break. Now it’s time for a vacation and relaxation right? Well, yes but not entirely. I’ve made the mistake in the past of utilizing my breaks as “detox” periods from school and a...
Plenty of Bible interpreters treat New Testament Greek the way my three-year-old girl treats my one-year-old boy: with well-meaning, blundering over-attention that ends up making him cry. Evangelical scholar and linguist Moisés Silva has a hilarious...
One of the things that really fascinated and even awed me after I asked for comments from readers of this Greek email list is that so many of you have taught yourselves Greek. Now, my experience is not universal, but I judge learning languages on...
We’ve all been there. You’re reading a book by some Christian author and they make a point in the course of their chapter. It’s a good point. You agree with it. It’s helpful. And yet, because this author prides themselves on being “biblical”, they...
I have a friend who began college as a religion major because he didn’t know what else to do, but who is now pursuing a PhD in English. He wasn’t much of a reader in high school, kind of a slacker, really—until one day in a freshman Old Testament...
Added a link to Paul Fredrikson’s review of Paul and the Faithfulness of God by N.T. Wright to the Book Reviews section under The New Perspective on Paul: Around the Web.
Are you trying to pay for a seminary education? In today’s world, it can be difficult to afford paying for any form of high education. If God has called you to further prepare for ministry, then seminary is one of the best ways to prepare for it...
Jennifer GuoIn just over a week I will be heading to Atlanta to attend ETS/SBL for the first time. One of the sessions I’m most excited about is A Dialogue with Francis Watson’s Gospel Writing: A Canonical Perspective in the Matthew section on the afternoon of...
Here’s a great question for you Greek students to ask, and a helpful (I hope) answer for you Greek teachers to give. J.H. writes: I am a second-year student in [a theological seminary] in Nigeria. I am presently taking Greek Grammar 1. My challenge...