Bøger af Joel Edmund Anderson

"Getting Schooled" is a humorous, insightful, occasionally irreverent, and blatantly honest memoir of Joel Edmund Anderson's life and career as a high school teacher. Beginning with his first foray into the field of education as a shy and terrified student teacher in a Conception Junction, Missouri, and continuing through the trials and tribulations as a substitute teacher in the suburbs of Chicago, a TOEFL teacher in the Peace Corps, and a full-time teacher at various schools in California, Arkansas, and Alabama, Anderson reflects on the day-to-day chaotic roller-coaster ride of a life of a teacher. With chapter titles such as, "It's a Hard Knock Life!" "There's Blood in the Water...I Think It's Mine!" "The Faculty: Staff...Infections and Meetings," and "Classroom Antics: Vibrating Pants, Rancid Gas, and Conch Shells," Anderson not only relates the real life daily triumphs and tragedies of teaching high school and navigating the education system, but he reminds teachers why they are in education in the first place and encourages them to learn from those quirky and unscripted experiences of the classroom. As Anderson says in his book, teaching is an improvisational art form, so realize that often it is the unscripted moments in life that teach us the most about life. Veteran teachers will be able to laugh along with Anderson's confessions of the the occasional chaos that broke out in his classroom and his struggles and joys as he learned to become a better teacher. Beginning teachers will be given a glimpse into what kind of career they are getting into as well. As the title says, "Getting Schooled" is all about the lessons teachers learn as they attempt to plan out their careers and live their lives.

The Blue-Collar Bible Scholar's Reader's Guide to the New Testament is the culmination of what Joel Edmund Anderson has taught in his Bible classes at both the high school level and college level over the past 25 years of teaching. As the title suggests, it really is a "reader's guide" to help anyone understand what they're reading in the New Testament.Most Bible commentaries simply are not aimed at the average, sincere Christian who simply wants to make sense of what he/she is reading. Scholarly works are aimed at scholars that not only tend to focus solely on historical-critical questions and issues, but often fail to read any given biblical book as a unified, literary whole. Simply put, most scholarly works on the Bible give a heavy dose of historical, archeological, and textual information about the biblical text, but they make very little effort to actually read the biblical text and help the reader understand it. This is where the BCBS Reader's Guide to the New Testament is different. To be sure, Anderson gives enough historical background, both of the New Testament world and each individual New Testament book, so that the reader can get a grasp of the general time period, but his ultimate focus is to help the reader understand the biblical text itself. He does this by doing a number of things with each New Testament book:1. He provides a brief explanation of the time of writing and authorship of each book, as is generally accepted in both biblical scholarship and Church Tradition.2. He provides a "Big Things to Know" section that highlights the major themes and literary imagery in each New Testament book. This essentially is a "heads up" to the reader to look out for these themes and images as he/she reads any given New Testament book.3. He provides a "Story Chart" or "Literary Map" of each New Testament book that gives the reader a visual of the overall flow of each New Testament book. This is extremely helpful, in that it helps the reader (a) follow the storyline in books like the Gospels and Acts, and (b) trace the argument that is being made in each New Testament letter.4. He then provides a "walkthrough" of each New Testament book, passage by passage, helping the reader understand how each New Testament book fits together as a coherent whole. 5. Finally, in the corresponding BCBS Reader's Guide to the New Testament Workbook, Anderson provides study/discussion questions for the reader as he/she reads through each book in the New Testament. The workbook can be used in individual study, a Sunday School or Bible Study small group, or a high school Bible class.

This second volume of my personal translation of the Old Testament covers the Major and Minor Prophets. Translating the prophets is a lot more challenging than translating the narratives found in the books of the Torah and Former Prophets. The reason why is because the prophetic books for the most part are written in the form of poetry, whereas narratives are in prose. The prose of narrative is fairly straightforward: David went out to Goliath and said such and such-the action is linear, and the story goes from point to point, and it is therefore easy to follow. But the poetry of the prophets is filled with shocking and violent imagery, metaphors, and similes; and it jumps from condemnation of sin in one verse, to promises of restoration in the next, and then back to oracles of judgment a few verses later. On top of that, the lives of some of the prophets spanned several decades during which the cultural and political contexts changed considerably, so if you don't know the historical situation in which these prophecies were uttered, then you can easily find yourself even more lost. Nevertheless, translating the Major and Minor prophets has been a very rewarding and fulfilling experience. Although I do not consider this translation to be in the same league with the official translations like the NRSV and ESV, it nevertheless reflects the tone and intensity that I feel when I read the prophets. If there is one thing true about the prophets, it is this: they are not "nice." The Old Testament prophets were men on fire: they raged against injustice, they howled in grief over the oppression of the poor, they verbally assaulted the unrepentant and unfaithful with descriptions of judgment and horror, and then they turned around and spoke words of healing and comfort with some of the most beautiful and tender poetry anywhere in the world. There was nothing half-measured with the prophets. They were intense and passionate about everything. In regards to my translation, I think the most obvious way that intensity is seen is in my use of exclamation points. I admit it, I use them a lot. That should give anyone a clue to how I read the prophets in my head. I don't hear them calmly making their pronouncements like they were news anchors on the BBC. I hear them shouting, pleading, and raging. So if you get the feeling that the prophets are shouting at you as you read my translation...they are!

This final volume of my translation of the Old Testament contains what the Hebrew Bible considers The Writings. They comprise of the poetry of the Psalms, the wisdom literature of Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes, the erotic love poem of The Song of Solomon, the laments over the fall of Jerusalem in Lamentations, the short stories of Ruth and Esther, the curious book of Daniel that contains both short narratives and strange apocalyptic visions, the post-exilic accounts of Ezra and Nehemiah, and the priestly overview of Israel's past found in I and II Chronicles. Whereas the first two volumes (The Torah and Former Prophets; The Major and Minor Prophets) obviously dealt with Israel's history and the prophetic interaction with that history, this third volume of The Writings is closest thing to "pure literature" you can find in the Bible. Yes, the Torah and Former Prophets are exquisitely crafted literary narratives, and yes, the Major and Minor Prophets are mostly written in the form of poetry. But the fact is, the majority of what we find in The Writings can be read and appreciated without reference to actual historical events. In other words, anyone who has gone through trials can immediately relate to Job; anyone who has pondered the fleetingness of life can soak in what Ecclesiastes says; and anyone who has been madly in love will be able to let the poetry of Song of Solomon wash over them. I was an English Literature major in college, and my focus was on poetry, and so I have a special fondness for this particular volume of my translation. And so, just as John Keating told his students in the movie Dead Poets Society, "We're not laying pipe, we're talking about poetry," I don't want to get in the way of what the poetry in this volume has to say by getting bogged down in historical background and details that, for all practical purposes, is not needed in order to appreciate much of what is in this volume.

Despite some significant and some not so significant differences between Bible translations, most are laid out very much in the same way, and are products of translational committees. In the process, much of the literary brilliance and texture within the Bible somehow gets translated away, and the reader is left unaware of what is being missed. What Joel Edmund Anderson has tried to do in this personal translation of the New Testament is to bring out into English much of that literary texture and imagery that is in the Greek. Joel Edmund Anderson (MA, MA, PhD) spent much of his career teaching English Literature and Bible at the high school level, and is now an adjunct professor in Religious Studies at the University of North Alabama. This translation (the JAV), is his attempt to highlight the literary artistry of the New Testament that gets lost in most English translations. He rearranges the order of the New Testament books and includes introductory articles on the nature of the Bible, the Intertestamental period, first century Judaism, as well as brief background articles on the individual books of the New Testament. Hopefully, the JAV will provoke thought and discussion among its readers.

In July of 1997, after finishing a master's degree in the New Testament at Regent College, I went with my dad to visit my grandparents, Lennart and Margaret Anderson, in Willmar, Minnesota. Because they were in their mid-80s, they had to sell their house at 723 West Trott Avenue, where they had lived for over 55 years. It was the house where they had raised their two boys, and the house where we grandchildren had always loved to visit and explore, whether it was the old storage room upstairs, our dad's and uncle's boyhood bedroom, the backroom next to the kitchen, or the basement that contained old baseball bats and a makeshift mini-basketball hoop where our dad and uncle who play, and where our grandpa did his wood-working projects. Their new house was smaller and simply not the same. Still, it was nice to see them. My grandpa listened attentively to me as I told about the courses I had taken at Regent, and then said, "Stay here, I want to show you something." He went back to one of the rooms and brought out a handmade leather-bound book-it was a hand-written copy of the New Testament. But it wasn't just a hand-written copy. It was, in fact, my grandpa's life work. Back in 1940, when he was a recently married man and a new father, he decided to teach himself enough New Testament Greek, so that he could, with the help of Greek lexicons, go through the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament, and produce his own, personal translation of the New Testament. He did this without telling a soul. And over the course of 50 years, in the course of living his life, raising a family, and watching his grandchildren grow up, through World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Iran-Hostage Crisis, and the fall of the Soviet Union, Lennart Edmund Anderson immersed himself in God's Word, bringing about a little bit of the Kingdom of God into his corner of the world. And near the end of his life, he shared it with me. Later that fall, he came down with cancer, and we thought he might succumb rather quickly to it. Fortunately, after the initial scare, he soon recovered his strength, although we knew it that he probably did not have much time left. In December of 1997, our family celebrated our last Christmas with my grandpa. He was still up and about, but it was clear that his strength was beginning to fade. That was the last time I saw him. In late February, the cancer came to take my grandpa, and within a week, on March 2nd 1998, one week short of his 87th birthday, Lennart Edmund Anderson died. At his funeral, people recounted the things he had done in his life: he built his own acoustic guitars, he was a life-long Gideon, he taught himself the accordion and regularly went to the local prison to play for the inmates and to lead Bible studies, he was married for 60 years, raised a family and saw his grandchildren grow up...and for 50 years, he had immersed himself in God's Word. It may sound odd, but I distinctly remember thinking at the funeral, "I understand the idea of praying to the saints." For as I reflected on my grandpa's life, I saw that it was filled with the glory of God, and I understood that he had, in fact, run his race and was now receiving the upward call in Jesus Christ. He had entered into God's glory, was now perfected and transformed into the image of Christ, and had taken his seat in the great cloud of witnesses who were victorious in Christ. After he died, I was given his translation of the New Testament, and for the past 20 years, it has been on my shelf. Quite honestly, I wasn't ready to read it. But now, as the 20th anniversary of the last Christmas we shared with him, I felt it was fitting to not only read through my grandpa's translation, but to type it out and publish it, primarily for my family and friends who knew him and loved him. This translation represents the heart and soul of Lennart Edmund Anderson's life of devotion to Christ and commitment to God's W

This project of translating the Old Testament is one that has been going on since the summer of 1999, when I took a summer class in Hebrew at Regent College. As with my translation of the New Testament, my original intention was not to translate the Bible. It came about gradually, as I taught the Bible at various Christian high schools over the years. I would translate a particular passage or chapter I was planning to cover, so that I would have a better handle on it. Over time, I'd realize that I would have a certain book almost done, so I would translate the rest of it and finish it off. At some point, as I kept going, it became a goal of mine to translate the entire Bible. I was no doubt inspired by my grandfather, who had taught himself rudimentary New Testament Greek so that, with the aid of lexicons, he hand-wrote his own translation of the New Testament over the course of 50 years. This translation is primarily a work of personal devotion. I have no illusions that this will compete with the likes of the ESV, NIV, NRSV, or any official translation for that matter. I'll just be happy if anyone who buys it takes the time to drop me a note to tell me what they thought about it...as well as point out any small errors that are undoubtedly nestled in these pages. As often as I've read through this translation, I'm sure I've missed a few mistakes. In any case, there are a number of distinctives to this translation. Allow me to point them out here: (A)Words Used in Relation to God: I've decided to use the actual Hebrew words Elohim/elohim and its variants instead of God/gods, and Adonai instead of "lord" or "master." In addition, I use YHWH to denote the Tetragrammaton instead of the usual LORD used in most English translations. (B)Transliterations instead of Translations: There are also a handful of other Hebrew words that I've chosen to simply transliterate, in order to give this translation a more "Hebrew feel," as well as to call attention to the importance of some words. (C)Translational Choices: In addition, there are a few specific translational choices I've made that are different than most translations. There are numerous other translational distinctives throughout this work that I explain in the footnotes. For that matter, I've made it a point to keep the footnotes to a minimum. I want to be sure to give enough information to help the reader understand what is being said, but I don't want to interfere with the task of reading well. And that really is the goal of this translation: as much as possible, I want the reader to be able to read in English the various words, names, and literary features that would be obvious to one who reads the Old Testament in Hebrew. In even the best translation, there are literary elements that are lost. I hope that in this translation a few of those literary elements can be found again. I find the Old Testament fascinating. Simply put, it's a good read! I hope this translation helps to open the door to the world of the Old Testament, so that the reader can explore the fascinating story of God getting down in the mud of human history. If the Old Testament shows one thing, it is that salvation is a dirty business. At the same time, there's something liberating about being a kid again and playing in the mud. So enjoy. I also have a blog entitled "resurrecting orthodoxy" at joeledmundanderson.com. Drop me a note and tell me your impressions of the translation.