A New Look and a New Title

As I've been teaching Bible and Humanities for half a decade now, I figured it was finally time to get professional about blogging.  Certainly there is a lot of clean-up work that needs to be done, but I think a layout change and a Twitter feed (@QereKetiv) is a good start.

A name change is also necessary.  When I started the "Withdrawals of a Theological Junkie" the point was to express how I wanted to stop a rather nasty habit (theologizing) and just couldn't seem to.  It was a dark point in my experience, which has been somewhat chronicled here.  I have no plan to delete any posts that have documented it, but I may clean some of them up (some contain errors too juvenile to allow).  Now, I find that the metaphor of "Qere Ketiv," which comes from the Hebrew Scriptures is apt.  The qere is "what is spoken" in the public worship, whereas the ketiv is what is written -- that is, the literal word on the page of the Masoretic Text.  The ketiv is the text, but sometimes it doesn't quite make sense.  So, the reading is maintained, but a scribal note is made to read something slightly different in the public worship.  A beautiful text critical system that is over 1,000 years old.  Better than our clunky critical apparatuses that are in the modern eclectic texts.  The metaphor of the Qere Ketiv speaks to the nature of theology: sometimes we must go beyond a prima facie reading of the text using a regula fidei, a rule of faith that guides interpretation.  That regula is none other than Jesus Christ who has come, has died, has been raised, has been ascended, and will come again.

I'd appreciate comments on what you'd like to see here and what you think of the new layout.

Thanks to Dr. Byron Curtis for helping me to further clarify my explanation of the qere and the ketiv.