I have not written anything in a while.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I have written a few things, but not for my blog. My last post was my 2021 Reading List. Here are the writing projects from the last several months.
Climate Change Article
Last Fall I read Dr. Katharine Hayhoe’s excellent book, Saving Us: A Climate Scientists’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. After sharing about it briefly on twitter, I was given the opportunity to write an article about climate change for Testimony Magazine, the official publication for the Pentecostal Assemblies Of Canada. Having my words published in this historical periodical has been a dream of mine since College. For my article I looked at what the Bible says about taking care of creation and why it is connected to issues of justice. Read “God’s Good Creation: Talking Biblically about Climate Change” here.
Book Review
For the last year I have been part of an editorial team of Vanguard College students and alumni creating an open access journal. Vanguard Journal of Theology and Ministry is a place for students, scholars, and pastors to publish scholarly articles, creative pieces, and book reviews, with the goal of furthering conversations between theology and ministry. For our inaugural issue I submitted a book review of Martin Mittelstadt & Caleb Courtney’s Canadian Pentecostal Reader: The First Generation of Pentecostal Voices in Canada, which makes early Canadian Pentecostal writing more accessible than ever before. Read about why I recommend this resource in my review.
PhD Application
When my wife was getting close to the end of her PhD, I was able to begin figuring out the direction of mine. By the start of last summer I had chosen the program I wanted to pursue, connected with a potential supervisor, and began to do explore what I would want to research for the next 4+ years. I knew I wanted to study the Psalms and look at something to do with justice. After spending time each week reading articles and searching through books, not sure if I was getting anywhere, I came out of the summer with good idea of what I wanted to study.
The next several months were spent putting together my official research proposal with the help of my supervisor. I submitted it along with the rest of my application on April 7. Just this week I received an offer of admission to Bangor University in Wales. I am thrilled to be working on the supervision of Dr. Lee Roy Martin and to learn from other supervisors and students in the Centre for Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies led by Dr. Chris Thomas.
My project is tentatively titled Toward The Marginalized: A Pentecostal Reading of the Psalms. In it I hope to explore how the Psalms form our affections toward the poor, oppressed, and marginalized. I will do this through providing an affective reading of Psalms 9–10, 37, and 72. While I will not publish the research proposal here, I would love to connect with you to talk about it further. And if you have any wisdom for me as I begin this next academic adventure, pass it down.
Course Creation
Lastly, I have been writing classes. I spent time over the last year rewriting an online course on the historical books of the Old Testament for Master’s College & Seminary. This has been a fun project and I am hoping that it is ready to go for students this fall. I also wrote and taught a course on the Psalms at Vanguard College this past semester. This tied in well with my PhD research, and it was a joy to help students discover the benefit of reading, studying, and praying the Psalms.
Future Writing
These various projects have taken up most of my time and mental space, and this is why I have not posted much here. I want to write and post more. However, I officially begin my PhD research this month, I am refreshing a course on interpreting the Bible for the fall, and my wife and I just bought our first home which needs some work. So there is a lot going on. But I want to continue to work on my writing and thinking skills and this blog is a great place to do just that. If there is anything particular that you would be interest in me writing on, let me know in the comments.
