Bart Ehrman to speak at MTSU Friday, Feb 18th

If folks are in or near Murfreesboro (about 40 miles south of Nashville) this weekend, this will be worth your time.

The Middle Tennessee State University Department of Philosophy
is happy to announce a lecture by

Professor Bart D. Ehrman
"Misquoting Jesus: Scribes Who Changed the Bible and Readers Who May Never Know"

Friday, February 18 at 3:30
State Farm Room of the Business and Aerospace Building

The lecture is free and open to the public. Professor Ehrman will be signing copies of his books immediately following his lecture.

Bart Ehrman is the James A. Gray Professor with the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among Professor Ehrman's fields of scholarly expertise are the historical Jesus, the early Christian apocrypha, the apostolic fathers, and the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.
He is the author of over twenty books. Among his most recent are a Greek-English edition of the Apostolic Fathers for the Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press), an assessment of the newly discovered Gospel of Judas (Oxford University Press), and three New York Times Bestsellers: Jesus Interrupted ( an account of scholarly views of the New Testament), God's Problem (an assessment of the biblical views of suffering), and Misquoting Jesus (an overview of the changes found in the surviving copies of the New Testament and of the scribes who produced them). His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

The lecture is part of the annual Applied Philosophy Lyceum sponsored by the Department of Philosophy with appreciation to the Distinguished Lecture Committee.

Sewanee's School of Theology chosen as one of six sites for project exploring the function of the Bible in the worldwide Anglican communion

[Posted originally on the University of the South alumni webmail, here]

The School of Theology at Sewanee: The University of the South has been chosen as one of six sites worldwide to host a regional group working on a major new project of the Anglican Communion. The School of Theology will host the North American group that will be part of a new exploration of the ways the Bible functions in the life of the Church.

The Rev. Robert MacSwain OGS, instructor of theology and Christian ethics at Sewanee, has been named the coordinator of the regional group, which will organize the project’s case study work within Canada and the United States.

“The Bible in the Life of the Church” project was launched by the Anglican Communion late in 2009. It aims to explore how Anglicans in different contexts actually use the Bible by exploring Scripture together and reflecting on the encounter; to produce resource materials for use at all levels of Christian education; and to re-evaluate the ways in which Anglicans have heard, studied, and received Scripture.

This major three-year project was mandated by the Anglican Consultative Council at its Jamaica meeting in May 2009. It has been described by the Archbishop of Canterbury as a “serious examination of how the Bible is used in our [the Anglican Communion’s] worship and decision-making.”

While much of the project’s work will be prepared by the regionally-based groups and brought to a Communion-wide coordinating group, local groups within each region will take part in the project by contributing to and testing the material that emerges from the work of the regional groups. MacSwain says, “In this way, the project will involve wide grassroots
participation from around the Communion, as well as draw upon the work of academic biblical scholars and theologians.”
Other regional groups are based around theological education institutions in East Africa, Southern Africa, South East Asia, Oceania, and Britain.

The Very Rev. Dr. William S. Stafford, dean of the School of Theology, says, "With our faculty, who all think hard and care deeply about the Scripture's use in the church, and with Education for Ministry spreading particularly effective ways for adults to reflect on the Word and their lives, Sewanee is a natural site for a project such as this. We are honored to serve the Anglican Communion in this way."