IVP - Addenda & Errata - June 2011 Archives

Not Another Commentary!

Do we need any more commentaries? I recently came across this comment at the opening of D. A. Carson’s review of J. Ramsey Michaels’s NICNT commentary on John:

When my students ask if we really need yet another commentary on such-and-such a biblical book, I sometimes tell them that, even if we do not need another commentary, we can always do with more commentary writers. What I mean is that we must constantly produce people who wrestle with the biblical texts, or pretty soon no one will be able to do it very well. Normally great commentators arise out of a plethora of people writing commentaries. This is, of course, a polite way of conceding that many commentaries are not all that memorable. They contribute little by way of freshness, genuine insight, or mature scholarship. They are simply the price to pay for major contributions.

So You Think You Can Review This Book

Here is a second edition of a blog from the fall of 2007. DR

One of the annoyances of being an editor is reading negative postpublication reviews of books that you’ve acquired and edited and think deserve better, or at least more serious, interaction. It’s not that we think our books are without fault (editors often know where the faults are better than the next person), it’s that we want them to be treated respectfully and fairly. But editors rarely find it appropriate to respond to a book reviewer, though we do vent in our offices and editorial hallways. In my quest for suitable blog material, I’ve been jotting down types of book reviewing sloth (“sloth” being inspired from my current reading of Barth’s discussion of sin as sloth in CD IV.2.

Goddess Behaving Badly

Chomolungma, the Goddess Mother of the Earth, is one harsh deity. Otherwise known as Mt. Everest, this tallest of the world’s peaks has claimed the lives of over 215 climbers in nearly sixty years. Several months ago I attended a presentation by a home-town young man who had ascended Everest several months earlier and was giving an account of his experience on the expedition. In fact he is the son of a famous Everest climber.