Five Influential Books Meme

There is a meme floating around that asks what five books have most influenced the way you read scripture. I am going to list the five books that have most influenced me in the past year, in which I have spent a significant amount of time rediscovering scripture. During the past year I have radically changed my approach to scripture, and much of this has been due to my interaction with the biblioblog community. However, these books and authors have been influential. Here they are in chronological order:

1. Velvet Elvis – Rob Bell
2. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth -Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart
3. New Testament Exegesis – Gordon Fee
4. Greek for the Rest of Us – William Mounce
5. The Message – Eugene Peterson

This last one is a work in progress as it is a more recent acquisition. Reading the Bible in paraphrase has been very enlightening however. I tag anyone that has not completed this meme yet to go ahead and do so. You can read all of the responses to this meme at the original blog here:

So Many Books, So Little Time

 

Update

I have updated my About Me page as the information there was a year old. Also, I have made a few revisions and updates to my blog roll. This past week I have added around a dozen new blogs to my feed reader, and if they prove to be interesting I will add them to my blog roll.

Also, I will be shifting the focus of my blog from Greek and Biblical Studies into one that is more generally focused on life and my faith. I think that it will be more interesting for me to blog, and hopefully more interesting to read.

 

One Year of Blogging

Well today marks my one year anniversary for this blog. It has been an interesting experience, and I’ve learned a lot from many of my readers. I just glanced at my visit numbers and was surprised to see that I’ve had over 15,000 visitors in only a year. I’m not sure what to make of that really. I guess I am encouraged that there are people out there who have a genuine interest in learning more about the scriptures. Thank you for reading, and I look forward to creating my future posts and reading yours as well. We’re still very busy with the newborn, but once things settle down I hope to get right back into the swing of things.

If you are curious, my most popular page is the ESV Study Bible Review, with the most visits and the most hits from the search engines. I just checked Google and it is now the very first link, up from number six just a month ago.

 

Milestone

I just happened to glance down and I noticed that my hit meter now shows that I have had exactly 13,000 visitors to my blog in the ten months that I’ve been blogging. I would have never predicted that I would have received this much traffic when I first started out. I’ve been reflecting on that number for a few minutes and I am not sure whether this blog has been more helpful to myself or to others. Interacting with other blogs has really altered my faith and opened my mind to new depths of studying scripture. Also it has been nice to actually write some articles and play with image editing; things I rarely did before for fun. Anyways, just wanted to say thank you for stopping by, and there will be some more translation related posts coming this month.

 

Castle of Nutshells

I like this blogger so much that I’ve titled this post after the name of his blog. I’ve noticed Damian commenting recently on several blogs that I frequent so I’d like to point anyone reading my blog in his direction. He’s got a precise writing style that I find easy to read and we share similar interests. Head on over to the Castle of Nutshells blog to see what I’m talking about.