Another round of news!

My dissertation is off to committee, but it appears they can’t meet until after the summer deadline which means… one more semester of tuition! Defending means it’s 99% done, and with my defense scheduled for August 26, it will soon be completely finished.

Second, I gave virtually the same talk in Salzburg, Goteborg, and Paris over the summer. It was recorded; fwiw, this was my second draft. My instructions were to avoid lengthy quotations, keep it simple, and avoid technical terminology. So my first draft which had lots of quotes, was somewhat American-centric, and technical, went out the window. Still, it’s good, short (25-minutes), introductory, and apparently I haven’t talked about these aspects much.

They also did short interviews with us.

Third, I want to promote two recent interviews and an article. The first is with BYU professor Joshua Sears, who has done some good stuff. (I’d highly recommend his BYU Studies article, “From Biology Major to Religion Professor:Personal Reflections on Evolution” which is one of the articles we solicited for the special issue. The rest are forthcoming elsewhere. I’ve cribbed several examples from his article.) This hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, because it’s a new series, from BYU’s Steven Harper.

The other is with LDS Yale professor Sam Wilkinson. He has a new book, Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of Our Existence (Amazon Affiliate link). A lot of big names blurbed this book positively, like Francis Collins, the head of the National institute of Health, MD/PhD, director of the human genome project, a committed convert to evangelical Christianity, and advocate of evolution. He’s been making the rounds on numerous podcasts, interviews, radio shows, etc. He does an LDS one here, and goes more in that direction.

Fourth, I’m doing a 4-part series at Education Week August 20-23, each one at 7:30pm on BYU campus.  This is called “Making Sense of Scripture by Putting the Text in Context.” I start with explaining why context is important, implicit contexts, and the resources laypeople can use to get at them. Then I cover historical/cultural contexts, linguistic contexts and reading in translation, and literary contexts/genre. Good stuff

Lastly, in October, I’ll speak at FAIR’s online-only Church History conference. My topic will be related both to a fireside I’ve done in a few places, “Scripture, Science, and History-writing: Elder Ballard’s Subtle but Radical Reformation.” I blogged about it a little, but have fallen behind, with only two parts so far.

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