The plan is to post an episode on Monday morning each week. In each episode I'll "fool with" a different text, to see if I can dig up any surprising inspiration and challenge for today's world.
On the blog, I'll also post some additional resources if you're interested in digging into the week's text a little deeper.
This week, we're looking at the first chapter of 1 Corinthians, particularly verses 18-29, which you can read in full here.
If you read the full section, you can see clearly some of the divisions in this early Christian community. Paul's generalizations about "Jews" and "Greeks" sound a bit jarring to modern ears, but he's addressing head-on a very present conflict between different groups in the Corinthian community. In their commentary in the New Interpreter's Bible, J. Paul Sampley summarizes it like this: "Paul has abandoned the former divisions of humanity into Jews and Greeks because he recognizes that God has called both Jews and Greeks." (see Volume X of The New Interpreter's Bible Commentary, Nashville: Abingdon, 2002).
Another great resource on the Corinthian community, if you really want get your hands dirty, is The First Urban Christians by Wayne Meeks (Yale University, 2003).
And if you really want to get into the philosophical weeds, you can take a crack at The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, by Jack Caputo (Indiana University, 2006). I can't make heads or tails of the thing, but maybe you can.
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