Slogans have always occupied our public attention, and the ways that an enemy redefines a slogan can be as important as the phrase’s original connotation. We can learn a fair bit about public life and public speech just tracing the course and changes and counter-thrusts surrounding words and phrases like fake news, alt-right, social justice, and woke. Sola Scriptura goes back centuries before these other terms, and its career likewise promises to shed light on some complex relationships between texts and communities whose common lives involve something called Bible. Dr. Ben Witherington’s recent book Sola Scriptura: Scripture’s Final Authority in the Modern World from Baylor University Press explores both the ways Sola Scriptura as a phrase has changed and the important continuities that emerge when careful historians examine the Church’s relationships with the Holy Scriptures.

Taken down to their etymological components, scriptures are any written texts and literature is any human craft involving letters, usually of some alphabet or another. But etymological roots don’t go far making sense of the fascination and the division and the devotion and the emotion that literature and scriptures bring forth in readers of all sorts. David Jasper has spent a career examining the literary character of Christian and Jewish Scriptures, the strange gravitational influences those Scriptures have exerted on recent literature, and all kinds of likewise compelling things, and his new collection of essays Scripture and Literature: A David Jasper Anthology traces some of the big questions that he’s pursued over the years for the benefit of just those readers, including us.

What is education for? The oldest grand library of which I have any knowledge is the tablet-collection of the Assyrian emperor Ashurbanipal, and as far as I can tell, it’s mainly a collection of magic spells for the court sorcerers to draw from when they need this or that kind of wizardry. And on the other end of things, in our little corner of the twenty-first century, some colleges seem to advertise exclusively (or pretty dang near exclusively) what kinds of financial benefits their schools offer to those who enroll. Folks who have heard the Christian Humanist Radio Network talk about education over the years know that we tend to favor visions of education from somewhere in between historically and nowhere in the vicinity theologically, and that’s why I’m excited to have Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro and Dr. David Henreckson on the show to talk about The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education from Plough Press. This collection, which they edited with Jessica Hooten Wilson, doesn’t really get into the sorcery end of things–just not that urgent any more, I suppose–but have a good deal to say about the aspirations and visions of education that in our moment stand as a compelling and faithful calls to Christian communities concerned with teaching what’s most worth teaching.