“Hi, I’m Paul and this is Barnabas…”

This last week I've been tutoring a group of trainees in ethnographic research methods. Sounds grand, but basically  this is about conducting formal interviews with a cultural informant in order to better understand a culture from an insider's point of view. All this made me wonder what Paul and Barnabas's trip to Lystra might have …

Beat until stiff and stand in the fridge

Words do not carry immutable meaning as defined by an entry in a dictionary. Certainly, they bring core meaning with them, but words are moulded both by the words that accompany them and the stage on which they are placed. The whole is irremediably more than the sum of its parts. This is true of …

“The audience are literally electrified and glued to their seats”

Having just watched A.N. Jacobs' TED talk on "The Year of Living Biblically", in which he tried to live out - literally - every one of the Bible's commands, I thought it a good moment to fire off a couple of thoughts on biblical interpretation. You see, a couple of Sundays ago we hit 1 …

Say “Shibboleth”…

This week and next sees me in Llanelli, South Wales, teaching an introduction to linguistics and language learning skills to 17 Koreans, 3 Brits and 1 American. No Jews this time, though there are a few times in Scripture when some unsuspecting Israelites may have wished they had had the chance to do this course. Some …