A great🧵 One day somebody’s going to write a PhD on Charlie Kirk’s funeral as the consummation of American evangelical syncretism. Like, there’s so much text and sub-text here. Just deeply disturbing.

Jim's RPG: a system where your primary skills are: Mowing Fencing Painting Cleaning Roofing Electrical Plumbing Flooring Removals Hazardous Material Blinds Termite and Pest Control I.T. Pool Care Security Glass Security Doors Insurance Tree and Stump Removal Dog Wash Window and Pressure Cleaning …

Book Announcement: The Authority of the Septuagint

This is the kind of thing that I (as someone in a very different part of the humanities) would love to get my hands on. That academic pub price tag, though :c

If you're itching to read about "Apocalyptic" in the most arcane senses of that term, perhaps to distract you from much else apocalyptic in our times, this is the series for you! humanhistoriesofkn.substack.com/p/away-from-...

So Bluesky's a fairly glum place, but as a small piece of good news: I got married 😊

Something something Second Foundation

🎶(Shekhinah Shekhinah)🎶 Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of lying hips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of lying hips.

One day … greenroninstore.com/products/tes...

There was a young woman who visited my church this morning. I learned later (from my partner) that she and her family had fled Ukraine a few years back; she's not a Christian, but with all that's happened to her, she's looking to make some sense of life.

In Rod we trust

If you can read Tim Keller in your quiet time, you can read Judith. I don’t make the rules.

The latest Addition to Daniel

PhD thesis coming along nicely, I see

It’s not just the death of classical education, it’s also the death of the things that make individual universities unique and interesting. Biblical studies at USYD was unusual for an Australian uni, and it was all thrown away because execs wanted something more profitable.

Low-church Anglicans when the Bible Project starts covering the Apocrypha:

Broke: one day, someone will write a book about my work Woke: one day, someone will cite me Bespoke: one day, someone will be forced to explain to their readers how my system of sub-verse-level referencing works and why it’s wrong, before introducing their own equally awful system of referencing.

Me, desperately searching for information on Greek texts using the one scholar working on *Arabic* Daniel.

We’ll need to start taking up the slack;

ancient sumerian stand up comedian: who heckles from beneath me? do you not see how high my ziggurat is? the gods look upon me! (realizing that comedy comes from shared humility) but they look at me with disdain

This title is wasted on my subheading, but it's free to a good home.

The best thing about the Apple ecosystem is how I can back my phone to iCloud or to my desktop, but not both.

Verse order is my passion

RELEASED: Talmudifier, a Rust crate that typesets arbitrary Markdown text into Talmud-like PDFs. - Render beautiful page layouts with an internal TeX engine - Compile as an executable or a library - Supports marginalia and multiple fonts crates.io/crates/talmu... #rust #jewish #talmud #latex

Thankful today for Australia’s electoral system and political climate, and for the way it rewards stable, measured, and deeply boring politics.

The most important thing about Daniel is that it’s not about the present day; the second most important thing is that it is about the present day.

As a citizen of a country that will never be a great power, watching the world’s growing instability, militarism, and tyranny, I feel increasingly vindicated about specialising in the book of Daniel. I’ve felt this way at least since the 2019 Hong Kong protests, but I’m even more convinced now.

Wow, this must be the release of the year: A translation of the Samaritan Pentateuch into English side by side with the Hebrew Text, with the differences between the Samaritan and the MT highlighted in red. Best of all, it is open access! www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.116...

A fascinating and haunting read

ASCII roguelikes are the most epistolary game genre because they're letters moving back and forth

Every time I write section headings, I swing wildly between “I am a text-critic; this should be so dry it’s machine-readable” and “I’m doing weird comparative textual history; time to be ✨creative✨”

Guys some news

It's a fine day for a stroll up the linguistic garden path

More than anything, today is a great day for the Church to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount. May we as followers of Jesus organize our lives around his presence and his teachings, offering a prophetic and priestly witness that confounds the world.

In saecula saeculorum

I have taken the resources that were in the budget and which you were probably saving for higher education Forgive me they were needed to feed the AI bubble and to dismantle the humanities

The cult of the bargain is bad for books. It’s not easy for me to hear, though; most gifts I give are books, and yesterday I wandered through a bookshop and decided against buying anything because my book budget is small this year. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-01...

Something something Bebbington Quadrilateral

Good news! www.actheology.edu.au/australian-c...

Great fact

If, like me, you're currently searching/applying for jobs/postdocs in biblical studies and adjacent fields, you may be interested to know that the NT at Oxford account from Twitter also has an account here (@nt4ox.bsky.social), and it posts new listings regularly. Give it a follow!

In terms of literary history, Bilbo Baggins is older than Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by a good two years.

a helpful insight into British cultural traditions

“[Caracalla] even preferred, supposedly, to march on foot rather than use a chariot and was evidently quite physically strong. He liked to wear military dress, including a cavalry cloak – called a Caracalla – after which he took his nickname.“ My dumb brain: hehe, Big Red Riding Hood

And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had seven heads like seven swans, with ten lords riding on its heads, and on each swan a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a partridge, but had feet like those of a turtledove and a mouth like that of a calling bird...

Fun fact: “Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego” are, as far as I know, the usual names for the three men in the fiery furnace, but it seems much more common in antique/medieval Jewish and Christian literature to use their Hebrew names: Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah.

We skip Advent songs to our spiritual peril, and we fail to understand the coming of Christ when we only sing Christmas songs. Singing is the way that we become more fully like Christ, and thus more truly ourselves, *through* waiting, not *despite* waiting. www.wdavidotaylor.com/blog/advent-...

There’s a really weird kind of cognitive dissonance that emerges when one liturgical tradition that prioritises reverence and gravitas is retrieved by another tradition that prioritises other things. Case in point: ultra-low-church Anglicans getting blindsided by baptism liturgy.