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"NASA/Crew of STS-132, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons “I haven’t even said anything yet!” quipped Capt. Scott Kelly, striding onto stage, bedecked in his NASA jacket, as he greeted a crowd of hundreds, standing and applauding. The retired astronaut, who spent nearly a year aboard the International Space Station in 2015-2016, recounted his past life as the underachiever who, through pluck and persistence, aimed high – literally – overcoming inertia and self-doubt to obtain his dream job. The talk, sponsored by the Springfield (Massachusetts) Forum, was winsome, wise, witty, and well-received. Space travel, it so happens, is a life-long obsession of mine, and I’ve been known to drag my hapless teenage son out on cold, clear nights to glimpse the ISS zipping by, 248 miles overhead at 18,000 miles per hour. So all this stuff is grist for my mill. Capt. Kelly’s speech – though engaging – was, in many ways, a conventional motivational talk, lauding the rewards of working hard ...

[The series continues and now concludes the third in-person session.  Find the last post here .] d. J. Louis Martyn, Apocalyptic, and 20 th c. Historical Scholarship   McMaken : Now that we’ve had a chance to look at Luther and Calvin, let’s talk a bit about more recent trends in New Testament interpretation and, especially, how it comes together in J. Louis Martyn’s commentary on Galatians. This will give us a sense of how we interpret Paul today differently than our forebears did during the Reformation. My own way of reading is decisively shaped by the Reformation, and I find many important theological connections there. But there are also some very important corrections that we need to keep in mind that more recent historical scholarship has made to those Reformation approaches. For example, we’ve already tried to be very aware of the supersessionism embedded in how the Reformation read Galatians and how it developed into antisemitism. That is part of this story of more re...