I don’t usually advertise sellers of goods or services here, but this is something that academics and people interested in good scholarly resources are likely to be very interested in.

My new favourite bookstore in the world is the Book Depository. The price is very competitive with Amazon (I just paid about two New Zealand dollars more at the book depository for this book), but the reason I don’t generally buy from Amazon is the cost of shipping. What was a good deal becomes more expensive than buying locally because the cost of shipping is so high.

Here’s the thing: The book depository doesn’t charge for shipping. Yeah, you might think you read that wrong, but no, you didn’t. Shipping is free, worldwide. That makes it easily the cheapest place to buy new books. If you live in the states where you can already pay the same price that you get on Amazon, sweet. But if you don’t live there, and you end up either paying more locally, or paying high shipping  costs to buy from an overseas seller, this has to be the best option available to you.

They’re not paying me to tell you this, I just discovered this store and I was so impressed that I thought you might like to know.

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OK, so it lacks a bit of rhetorical punch, but it’s true. We’re number 27. While the most popular aspect of this site is probably the podcast, which a lot of listeners access via the itunes store, the blog itself isn’t too shabby either. Apparently it’s the 27th most popular blog (not podcast) in New Zealand. Each month you can check out New Zealand’s blog rankings over at “Something Should Go here, Maybe Later,” the halfdone blog, HERE.

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As I’ve mentioned, time is a big pressure on the success and regularity of this blog and podcast. The prospect of looking for extra work in evenings (as well as the papers I’m taking) is going to add to this significantly, and I’m searching for ways to free up as much time as I can to work on the podcast without sacrificing anything when it comes to income. So this is as good a time as any to mention another project that I work on:

Podcaster Music is a project I launched to make theme music for podcasters. Over the last week I’ve decided to expand the horizons a little and look at the possibility of making music for radio advertising (or any context when professionals might want some occasional music) as well.

Check the site out (especially the samples page), and by all means spread the word. It would be a tremendous help to be able to drum up a bit of online business, and even just a couple of clients a month would make a difference.

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[Note: This blog entry also appears as a guest post over at MandM, the blog of Matt and Madeleine Flannagan.]

I take some things for granted. People with a background in theology, biblical studies and hermeneutics or literature will be familiar with theories of meaning, but not everyone has (or wants) this background, and not everyone is familiar with theories of meaning. I thought it might be interesting to some readers to say a few words about it. Think of this as a very introductory post to the subject.

The question has importance for scholarship in general, but as a professing Christian the issue has a special importance to me because I believe that in the Scripture of the Old and New Testament we have something with a unique type of authority, so the way we interpret it is important. The issue centres on the following question: What does a piece of writing mean? To some the questions seems a bit silly. If you want to know what it means you just read it and find out. It means what it says! But strictly speaking, even someone who says this is likely to admit that not everything means exactly what it says. Writing comes in all genres: literal history, biography, poetry, parable, apocalypse and so forth. There are cases where meaning is bound to be unclear to many readers. So what, in principle, does a piece of writing mean? To the unfamiliar reader, I’m going to outline two major alternatives: an authorial intent theory of meaning and a reader response theory of meaning.
Read the rest of the entry »

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