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  • Biola News

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    Once you know your strengths, what’s the next step? A Saturday workshop hosted by the MBA Alumni Chapter on March 19, 2011 began answering that...

  • Biola News

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    Rain couldn’t keep Sacramento-area Biola alumni away—a crowd of young and not-so-young turned out on Friday, March 18, 2011 for a palate-pleasing...

  • The Good Book Blog

    Joe Hellerman — 

    The following post outlines some of the nuts-and-bolts of leading a church as a plurality of pastors. It is an excerpt from a manuscript tentatively titled, When Pastors Were Servants: Recapturing Paul’s Cruciform Vision for Authentic Christian Leadership.

  • Biola News

    In prayer and support for Japan, Biola gathers resources

    Benefit concert to be held next week featuring singer Judith Hill

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    In the wake of the 9.0-magnitude earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the Biola University community is collaborating to support and pray for those...

  • Biola News

    Rick Warren Caps Off Missions Week

    Pastor addresses missionaries and missiologists at annual conference

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    Rick Warren, the well-known pastor of Saddleback Church and best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life, visited Biola on Friday morning, March...

  • Biola News

    Chorale conductor honors soldiers and families with musical tour

    “Love and Honor” tour inspired by bravery, loss and sacrifice

    Harmony Wheeler — 

    After her brother was deployed to Iraq last August, Chorale conductor Shawna Stewart’s plans for this year’s Biola University Chorale tour to...

  • The Good Book Blog

    Clinton E. Arnold — 

    Over the weekend, I spoke at Antioch Church in Bend, Oregon where Talbot alumnus Ken Wytsma serves as pastor. In the “Redux” (Q&A) session that followed my message, someone asked me, “What is Spiritual Warfare?” Here is my response:

  • The Good Book Blog

    Gary Manning Jr — 

    When I teach or preach from the Gospels, I always bring in relevant aspects of the historical and cultural background. Including such details not only helps us in our interpretation of the scene, but also helps us retell the story well – an essential part of preaching from narrative passages. Several passages in the Gospels involve soldiers. Movies about Jesus, and most sermons about Jesus, portray all of these soldiers as Romans. We sometimes get the idea that there were centurions on every street corner. But is this the case? I have pulled together some of the information that we have about soldiers in Judea and Galilee in the first century, and included a few comments about each scene in the Gospels involving soldiers.

  • The Good Book Blog

    Freddy Cardoza — 

    Ideas are not neutral and irrelevant. They are constructs of language that can have helpful or hurtful cooresponding effects. All ideas are not equally valid and are not necessarily even true... but, true or not, ideas can have powerful effects and great care should be taken in our handling of them.

  • The Good Book Blog

    Ashish Naidu — 

    A friend of mine has a coffee cup with the following words printed on the outside, “Presbyterian Coffee: Predestined to be brewed decently and in order.” I chuckled when I saw it for the first time several years ago. The humorous one-liner nicely captures a couple of representative ideas that are associated with a particular church denomination. An amusing tongue-in-cheek way to integrate the love of coffee, a distinctive theological perspective, and a related view of church polity, one might say! Funny sayings aside, the hallmark of church polity of things being done “decently and in order” actually derives from Paul’s remark in 1 Cor. 14:40, where he instructs believers to be orderly in their worship and to avoid discord and confusion. I suggest that this regulative principle of church polity can be of great service outside its walls, especially in conversational contexts that can be potentially explosive.

  • Biola News

    Making Sense of Egyptian Uprising

    Arabic professor shares insights on recent revolution

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    Victor Khalil, professor of Arabic at Biola University, shed some light in an interview with Biola’s student newspaper, The Chimes, on the...

  • The Good Book Blog

    David Talley — 

    In addition to my faculty responsibilities at Biola University, I am a member of a pastoral team at a local church (www.graceevfree.org). We do not have a senior pastor. Our understanding of this is captured in two ministry values, namely “Elder Leadership” and “Spirit-led Decision Making.” It is my hope that the following summary of these ministry values might challenge you in your understanding of how the body of Christ is to function.

  • Biola News

    Three Biola Women Make Athletic History

    Conicelli named basketball player of the year; Miller sets new pentathlon record; Smith sets swimming record

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    Three Biola University women athletes kicked off Women’s History Month during the first week of March by making some history of their own. Jessilyn...

  • The Good Book Blog

    Freddy Cardoza — 

    Purity begets personal power. This personal power comes from integrity. Integrity creates inner strength, which manifests itself in strong character. This 'character' increasingly produces unmitigated power in the life of the person possessing it-- and such a person is fueled by nothing other than pure conviction.

  • Biola News

    Tweet Hunt Adds Excitement to Founders Day

    Biola celebrates 103rd birthday with scavenger hunt and burial of time capsule

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    Racing across campus, Biola junior Ben Kopec skidded to a halt outside the Student Health Center. By finding vice president Chris Grace standing...

  • The Good Book Blog

    Freddy Cardoza — 

    Edvard Munch's ultimate work was his expressionist series The Frieze of Life. In that series Munch sought to illustrate some of the most fundamental themes of the human experience: life, love, death, melancholy, and fear.

  • Biola News

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    The annual Alumni Awards were presented in chapel February 18 to four distinguished Biolans (Dr. Larry Acosta, 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award;...

  • The Good Book Blog

    Gary Manning Jr — 

    As a resident of Hawaii most of my life, one of the conversations that I have often had with visitors was about what to see when they came to Hawaii. I would tell them to get out of Waikiki, to be sure to visit Hanauma Bay early in the morning, and to try our local plate lunch, among other things. Hawaii is a great place to visit anyway, but hopefully my tips made the trip more enjoyable. I do something similar when I talk to people about the Gospel of John. John is a beautiful book that will bless and delight; but I have some tips that I hope will add to the reader’s enjoyment. Here they are – six questions that make up my traveler’s guide to the Gospel of John.

  • The Good Book Blog

    Joe Hellerman — 

    I recently spent an hour with a Talbot guy who is really ‘getting it.’ Not only is Peter a bright, disciplined student of the New Testament. He is also up-to-his-ears in local church ministry.

  • The Good Book Blog

    Rob Price — 

    Hey, if you can summarize Luther in 1,000 words, Calvin should be no problem. Not that Calvin’s any less interesting than Luther, just less open. In tens of thousands of pages of his surviving writings, including several thousand personal letters, Calvin gives only the rarest hints of what’s going on inside. It’s pretty obvious, though, that so profound an exegetical and theological legacy could only have come from a heart aflame for God.

  • The Good Book Blog

    Joe Hellerman — 

    Third semester Greek is a challenging place to be for our seminary students. Many of these folks are doing well just to hang on to what they learned back in Greek 1-2. Learning intermediate grammar finds our students negotiating a sharp turn deep in the tunnel of language acquisition. The proverbial light at the end of this tunnel—where knowledge of Greek pays significant exegetical dividends—gets almost snuffed out for a season by Wallace’s thirty-some categories of the genitive case.

  • Biola News

    Jenna Bartlo — 

    Biola donors assembled Saturday, February 12, 2011 for the Conservatory’s presentation of “Into the Woods”, the Tony Award-winning musical by...

  • The Good Book Blog

    Freddy Cardoza — 

    A sage once said that "Truth-telling is an act of violence." Regarding violence, anyone who has ever been victimized and that has suffered the resultant trauma knows its resonant results. It is like the proverbial pebble which causes a disproportionate effect-- rows of ripples that circumnavigate far from the point of impact, long after the rock has settled in the silt below.

  • The Good Book Blog

    Jeffrey Volkmer — 

    Along with speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, if one were to peruse the communication literature of most American, Evangelical churches, it would seem that Paul had somehow left off Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and blogs of every sort. The ubiquity of “social media” in all its iterations has found quite the tender audience in Evangelicalism with seemingly no parachurch ministry, church (along with each respective ministry therein), pastor, youth minister, or seminary able forge ahead without intermittingly spreading communicative buckshot across the world wide web at a 140 character pace.

  • The Good Book Blog

    Freddy Cardoza — 

    Fear can be rational or irrational. That said, there's a 'sense' in which it doesn't always matter whether one's fear is rational or not. That's because even if a particular fear happens to be irrational, that doesn't necessarily make it any less troubling. In fact, irrationality doesn't "negate" fear in the least-- and, in some cases, it can even breed terror.