Recently I was in Timaru again visiting my parents and picking up my children after some days with the grandparents. While I come relatively frequently to Timaru, I get to some areas very infrequently. So as I was driving or walking through the city I did notice the changes: the little shop closed, that one taken over by another chain, a house…

These days it is very cheap to communicate. It costs hardly anything to send emails or to call someone in the same country. Even international phone calls are significantly cheaper than in previous decades. That should enable us to communicate quickly and effectively with many people. But sometimes it seems that communication has become too cheap. Our email inboxes are now so…

This week I went to the annual meeting of the Aotearoa New Zealand Association of Biblical Studies. Here Bible scholars from throughout New Zealand and a few from Australia gave presentations on various aspects of the Bible and then questioned each other about the presentation. Some of these were quite detailed, for example one presentation about “allusive soundplay in Job 9:17”, arguing…