Right now I am listening to a video interview with Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message version of the Bible. Peterson explains how he became a Bible translator. First he became a biblical language scholar. Then he discovered books recently published about how to translate the Bible. He read translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, from Greek to English. He discovered the translation principles use by these translators. Finally, he began translating the Bible for his church congregation. Out of that experience came The Message. Peterson does not intend The Message to be a study Bible. But he intends it to help people understand the the message (!) of the Bible, expressed in contemporary English, applicable to their own lives.

You, too, can listen to this interview with Eugene Peterson:

http://www.qideas.org/practices/live/showing.aspx

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Have you ever found your attention wandering as your read your Bible or listen to it in audio form? Your brain is probably trying to multitask because you have so much on your mind in our busy world. The answer for reading the Bible with divided attention will soon be here, the RDWT Bible app produced by Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth Inc. With the RDWT Bible app, you will not only be able to read and listen to the Bible, but at the same time you will be able to take notes on what you are reading or hearing, or write down anything else that comes to your mind, all without missing anything from your Bible experience. Do you need to liven up your Bible experience? You can with the dramatized audio track or video track options which you can select as you are experiencing the Bible with…

My gracious and lovely wife has picked up her proverbial pen to begin blogging. In the last two days she is already more prolific than I am on actual blog posts for 2012! Her blog, Women Walking Wisely, provides her ruminations and biblically-informed thoughts on a variety of things that average, everyday Christian wives, mothers, daughters, and women may find interesting and helpful. I know that I have benefited over the years from her wise words and godly counsel–I hope that you will, too. You can find her blog at Women Walking Wisely. Happy New Year, and congratulations, Cheryl Marshall!

In linguistics we have a term for how you can use patterns to create new words: productivity. For example, the -ly suffix can be added to many adjectives to create new adverbs: “nice” becomes “nicely” while “able” becomes “ably.” That’s a productive pattern. What’s amazing is that children who are learning to speak a language natively start using such productive patterns intuitively, without ever being told explicitly how to do it. And they are correct most of the time. But when they misapply a productive pattern, it’s often funny. Tonight, I heard another funny. This evening Andrew and Kathryn (our 7 year old twins) decided they would sleep under a make-shift tent created by draping bed sheets over chairs and stools. As I was helping them lay down their make-shift beds, Andrew determined that he would use a huge beach towel as his “blanket.” Kathryn objected, misapplying a productive word-formation…