This is one of those things where you are tagged by someone you know. Jay DiNitto passed the torch to answer a few questions and I agreed to it. It didn’t hurt that he offered a flattering compliment, too.
1. What am I working on?
A Bible study in Song of Solomon is the current project so that I can complete a book on the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament (minus Psalms and Proverbs, each of which get their own volume later). My approach is that Solomon wrote this as moral drama, total fiction but with significant guidance in how God says romance should happen. It’s all about sex and marriage. Making it into some extended allegory about Christ and His Bride, the Church, seems to me a silly Western obsession and foreign to Hebrew thinking.
2. How does my work differ from others of its genre?
It comes with the territory: I’ve generally rejected Western Civilization and Western Christianity with it. While I don’t claim to have caught the whole secret of Hebrew intellectual assumptions in Scripture, I’m quite disappointed that so much of mainstream Christianity makes no significant effort to understand. I’ve spent a lot of time reading secular sources on ancient civilizations, philosophies, antiquities, etc. Most Christian scholars seem totally unaware that there is a difference between Western and Hebrew intellectual assumptions. I make no bones about embracing Hebrew Mysticism in particular, and Ancient Near Eastern epistemology in general. So I try to think like a Hebrew and translate that best I can into our Western world.
3. Why do I write what I do?
I write like this because I can’t avoid it. This thing burns like a fire in me and even if I were the only person reading my stuff, I’d still write it. That it happens to touch a few others is a bonus, but not a motivation. All of my books are free because I have a pension that just barely gets me by, though I do take donations.
4. How does my writing process work?
That’s both easy and hard to answer. On the one hand, I’m semi-retired with a good education and very little in the way of intruding responsibilities. So I can afford to write like a good Christian Mystic — when the Spirit of God moves me. For example, I put off this study in Song of Solomon because it just didn’t feel important until this past week. Now it matters. I study what others have said about it using some reference books I own and a few online sources I like, but I typically use them to eliminate what I won’t be saying. By the time I’ve read some of this other stuff, I generally have a strong sense of where I want to go with it.
For other types of literature: Fiction I write whenever a story comes into my head and won’t go away. I often churn it out in long sessions over a short period. A fictional world intrudes on my awareness; I explore it with my conscious mind. The story ends when the imaginary world fades out at some point. My stories tell themselves. I just give them shape in words. Teaching books I write when it seems I can’t avoid some topic any longer. If it starts growing into a book, I organize as much as I need to get started and simply see where it goes. Again, that stuff writes itself. Only one book I’ve written followed the standard academic format and planning.
