The main purpose of this blog is professional, to share my teaching and research ideas and questions with other scholars, students, pastors, and people who are interested in biblical studies. A lot of what you find here will be preliminary ideas, insights, possibilities, and snippets of thought–stuff I haven’t yet looked into or researched but want to put down here in case anybody else has information or related insights to share or would like to look into some of these matters further.
Another reason for recording some of these things here is to remind myself to look into them more when I get some time. Every day, I carry in my back pocket a little black notebook, in which I jot down ideas as I think of them–usually while sitting on the subway or reading or writing about something else; in other words, they come to me precisely when I can’t do much to investigate them further. When I get a little more time, I transfer them from my notebook to Evernote and tag them for retrieval some day when I can work with them. I’ll continue to do that, but why not also put them on here, too. Perhaps they’ll stimulate someone else’s interest or lead to a solution to a problem someone else is working on. As I say in my little epistle on the front page, “What good are our insights if we keep them to ourselves?”
So don’t expect fully researched and documented research papers on here. Even the full papers I post from time to time probably need to be updated or brought into conversation with wider literature than they currently interact with. All things in time.
Also, you shouldn’t expect the content here only to be about my professional interests and activities. I’ll also publish short pieces of social and cultural criticism, devotional reflections, and anything else I want to share with my readers.
I am married since 2002, and my wife and I live in the neighborhood of Harlem, in the borough of Manhattan, which is to say the county, city, and state of New York. (Did you know that New York City is actually five counties, one for each of the boroughs that constitute the city? The counties are smaller than the city here, unlike southern California, where I grew up.) We moved here four years ago for me to pursue a Ph.D. in New Testament in the Department of Theology of Fordham University, and we just decided in summer, 2009 that we would make our permanent home here.
What’s with the Greek letters phi and delta? Although my ancestry is mainly German, Irish, and English, both my first and last names are Greek in origin. Phillip is from the Greek word meaning “lover of horses” (although it was my wife who spent one summer teaching the horsemanship merit badge at a Boy Scout camp, not me). In Greek, the ph sound in the name Phillip is made by the letter phi, not pi, and it’s transliterated into English as ph, not p. (The same principle is at work in the abbreviation Ph.D. rather than P.D.) My last name comes from the Greek Dionysius, after a certain god of ill repute, known to the Romans as Bacchus.
If you have other questions or want to reach me personally for any reason, you may contact me through this blog.
