[This is a message I gave at Salem Friends Meeting, Liberty, IN, April, 2008.]

On Friday my wife, Suann, and I drove our daughter back to Indianapolis for her last week of the school year. We've made numerous trips into Indy over the past year and each time presented its own challenges of navigation. Because of the construction going on until the end of 2007 we tried to avoid going straight into Indy on 70 and then from the south attempt to find our way north to the Butler University campus. Instead, we first tried to go from Post Rd. with an east-west approach on 38^th Street. That was complicated by the State Fair traffic, the myriad of intersections, and crazy drivers weaving in and out of traffic. We then decided just to go around Indy on 465 to the north and come at the city from the north taking exit five on route 5, which is Meridian, and that takes us right near Butler. Obviously, that's going the long way around. It's easy to do, but it makes a long trip even longer. If we go that far, we might as well just keep going to West Lafayette [inside joke about Purdue University]. We tried numerous times to find ways to attack or retreat from Indy on a southerly route. On one trip in I turned the wrong direction—I went south instead of north —after getting off 65 and it wasn't until we hit countryside and saw planes landing nearby that we realized we were in the wrong place. Other times we tried to leave Butler going to the south only to discover we were in a scary part of town and construction prevented us from getting on 70. I finally made progress when I figured out how to get from the Butler campus to 38^th Street, to Martin Luther King Drive, on to 65 south, and then 70 east. After several attempts to make the reverse trip, I finally accomplished it and knew where I was going. I commented to Suann, "It's taken us a whole year, but we've finally figured out how to get to and from Butler."

For many of us growing up in small towns or in the country, the big city can be a challenging world. Remember the first time you, who grew up here in Liberty, Indiana, visited the big city of Connersville, Oxford, Ohio, or even Richmond. During elementary school years, you probably went with your family or on a school trip to see Cincinnati, Dayton, or Indianapolis. When you got older, you had your first trip to Chicago. Maybe you visited other major cities, perhaps even going to Washington, DC or New York City. That progression may have continued to the point of having your passport stamped in cities around the world. From some small neighborhood your perspective developed over time as you grew up to include a greater area and a larger concept of what and whom your world includes.

You learned about the world in school, but you didn't really broaden your mind until you experienced places and people different than you and your own. Maybe you stared the first time you saw someone with a different color skin than what you were used to. The first time you saw people dressed differently and speaking a different language you might have thought they were strange or perhaps even dangerous. You began to become accustomed to the fact that, although you share the world with people who look and live differently than you, people are basically the same wherever you go. They are no better and no worse than people like you. In fact, you might even have come to the conclusion that the values and customs of people from somewhere else are even better than your own.

As a teenager you thought the whole world revolved around you. As a young adult, you focused your energy on how to make your life better and to make a good life for your family. Somewhere during that time you will have realized that the world is much bigger than you, and there are more important issues than whether you own a nice home in a good neighborhood, drive a new car, and have the best entertainment center or home theater system in your family room.

That doesn't happen for everyone. Many adults are still children in the way they view the world. Their town is the best. They identify closely with their own political or geographical region and their local sports teams. Everyone ought to speak the same language they do, belong to the same religion and denomination they do, and hold to the same moral values. Perhaps they even want their own ethnic group to do better than others and to be in power. They want their own country to be the superpower and dominate the world. Since God has come to them in a particular way, that must mean it's the only right way, and only people who accept that way have real value and deserve to receive God's blessings and benefits. If others can't agree with their idea of how the world should be, they must be forced to comply even if it takes imperialistic policies, aggressive actions, or the violence of "shock and awe" indiscriminate bombings.

How do you see yourself? What is your primary self-identification? I'm speaking from within the context of a church, so you might expect I want you to say Christian. We're in a Friend's meetinghouse, so you might guess the most important identification is Quaker. Most of your are sitting with family members, so maybe family is the most important. We're a few months away from July 4^th; you're all good, patriotic Americans. Some people put their flag outside their home everyday or wear a flag as a lapel pin. There are churches in which people get tears in their eyes when they hear the words of the song "I'm proud to be an American."

How would it change our way of thinking to say my primary way of thinking about myself is that I belong to the human species? I am related to every human being in the world irrespective of how that other human's ancestors evolved in other places in the world and the ways they developed to think, believe, and act. Or perhaps to even go one step further, we humans share this planet within an interdependent ecosystem and do not have the right to destroy the rest of the planet for our own benefits. In religious language, we are part of God's creation. It's debatable whether we are really the pinnacle of the ascent of evolution or if we are in fact the malignancy that will eventually destroy our own home. You might recall the word's of Agent Smith in the movie "Matrix."

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had, during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you aren’t actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we... are the cure.

Christians like us have come to read the Bible in a very selective way to reinforce our own provincialism and chauvinism. Even when we talk about the Bible's own history of transmission and translation, we think of it as beginning with Hebrew and Greek in the Middle East, becoming readily available in the language of the people in German during the reformation, and eventually culminating with English translations in Britain and in the U.S. From the United States, then, the Bible gets translated to the other languages of the world—from us goes forth the gospel. Where did we get such an idea? How chauvinistic! We are neither the terminus to which the gospel was destined nor the terminus from which God's message goes forth to the world to gather the world's sheep into our fold.

The stories of the Old Testament point again and again to the way in which humans should not turn their attention to themselves and their own but realize they are part of a much larger world. Adam and Eve were forced to leave their gated-community called Eden. When people started going in a wrong direction, one man and his family were preserved while God treated all the rest of the human family as one. The story of the Tower of Babel relates how, when one group decided they were the best and only divinity remained to be conquered by erecting a pyramid to the sky, God caused humans to have a variety of cultures and languages and to spread throughout the world. Our Bible traces one ethnic group's belief that God uniquely called their ancestor to come from northern Mesopotamia, from modern-day Iraq, to be given a corridor of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Abraham, whom Genesis calls "the father of many nations," recognized the rights of others to live together and share ownership of the land. According to Gen 23, when Abraham wants to have a burial place, he insists on buying the property from "the people of the land" living there rather than taking it by force. When his descendants find themselves living as slaves in Egypt, it is an adopted, Egyptian-raised child of the Pharaoh who leads the Hebrew people from the foreign land. Although this monotheistic Semitic group with its own particular cultural values seeks to remove their idol-worshipping cousins from some of their cities in the Land of Canaan, to a large extent they find ways to live together with them. Even their national constitution demands they respect the alien living among them. Hear what the Torah says, "When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God" (Lev 19:33-34).

The Israelite and Judean kings often marry foreign wives and adopt the ways of others, beginning with David and Solomon. The philosophy and literature of other groups become assimilated into theirs. Their prophets often speak about their need to be a light to the other nations of people. They tell the story of the prophet Jonah, whom God actually tells to go to Iraq—what was then the Assyrian city of Nineveh—to call them to repent of their misdeeds because God cares for them. God tells the pouting Jonah, when God does not destroy them with "shock and awe" like Jonah wants God to, "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?" (Jonah 4:11).

Progressive Jews of the centuries before Christ sought to become a part of the world scene instead of being isolated with their own language, culture, and religious texts and ceremonies. Jesus comes out of that tradition as someone who moves outside of his own village and territory. He cares for people from all walks of life: the rich and poor; men, women, and children; Jews, Samaritans, Greeks, and Romans; rural people as well as urban elites; farmers, fishmongers, trades people, merchants, tax-collectors, religious authorities; people suffering from diseases, injuries, blindness, deafness, mental illnesses. Jesus talked about God's kingdom not the kingdom of Israel (and certainly not the kingdom of the United States of America). When the church is born at Pentecost, the gospel message was not proclaimed in one language. Everyone there heard God's message in their own native language. Hear what Acts says.

Amazed and astonished, they asked, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs-- in our own languages we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power (Acts 2:7-11)

Many people have the view that the earliest Christianity was a Jewish Christianity that became suppressed and was eventually lost. Some people have tried to recreate a kind of Jewish Christianity with Jewish customs and claim that Christians should all adopt this kind of Christian Judaism. But that's not how it happened. The Christianity that took root and spread was a Hellenistic Jewish form of Christianity. The lingua franca of the day was Greek. It was the language of commerce and travel. It was the language that was the most common to people within the Roman empire. The good news about God's kingdom was for all people--for all people equally, for all people regardless of their particular geographical location, language, and culture.

Christianity quickly became the tool of empires, whether that was the Holy Roman empire, the British empire, or the empire the United States seeks to develop. Those Christians who identify their place in the world as centered in their own group of people and their own nation are allowing themselves to be used in this way in many subtle and not so subtle ways.

How big is your world? Do you spend most of your time thinking about yourself, your own needs, your own condition, your own future, and those near and dear? Or do you see your world as a much larger place, filled with people who look, think, and act differently than you but are essentially the same? Do you give some part of your day to read the newspaper and watch the evening news, not as a voyeur into the sensationalistic and sentimental, but to be informed about the lives of people around the world because you care for all the people of the world? Do you find ways to educate yourself about how the rest of the world lives—how they speak, how they practice their faith, how they express themselves in art and literature, how they feel about their own opportunities for health, safety, and freedom? Do you give some of your money and time to help those who are strangers and foreigners, even those some might call enemies?

The measure of our world is the measure of own souls. Our devotion to God is only as deep as our world is wide. We cannot afford to live our lives any longer in isolation, in selfishness, narcissism, or even well-intentioned patriotism. We are extremely privileged people upon whom is placed a huge burden of responsibility to the rest of the world. Each of us owes it to ourselves and to the world to broaden our horizons, to live responsibly in the world, and in this way to serve God the creator and sustainer of all.

[This is a sermon I preached at Salem Friends Meeting, Liberty, IN, in April, 2008.]

In 1992 the world reverberated with the simple words of Rodney King, "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?" We continue to scratch our heads and wonder, "Why can't we all get along?" I think the simple answer is not everyone wants to get along. There are people who become committed to a very rigid view of how people are to live, believe that it's the only right way, and then insist on everyone conforming to their way. These are people we call extremists or fundamentalists.

They come in many varieties. The extreme can be on either end of the spectrum, whether that continuum is about politics, economics, or religion. We talk about them as being on the right or on the left. No matter which side of the aisle they are on, they do not have an aisle seat. They sit way over on one side or the other. Their extremism is the only thing they have in common. Everyone else on the spectrum are their opponents: The further away others are on the spectrum the greater the animosity, anger, and even hatred toward them.

In our current political climate, we most often hear the word extremist in conjunction with Muslims. The term "terrorist" has almost become synonymous with Muslim extremist. There do exist Islamic factions around the world that see Islam as the final and ultimate revelation of God to humanity. They believe God didn't get it quite right the first time with Judaism; God made some progress with Christianity; but God finally got it right when he divulged his secrets to Muhammad. The ensuing compilations of Islamic law, therefore, contain the ultimate pattern for community and national life. For many of these extremists, their way is the only way and all others must conform. We see this throughout the Arab world from the east in Indonesia to the western Maghreb of North Africa. We talk about Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Besides the more militant factions, there are Islamic fundamentalists who are working to bring Arab cultures back to what they see as the original intentions of the Islamic "founding fathers," to borrow a phrase.

They certainly are not the only kind of religious extremists terrorizing the world today. Remember back to 1994 when Yitzhak Rabin (then Prime Minister of Israel), Shimon Peres, and Yassar Arafat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their work to bring peace to the Middle East through the Oslo Accords. On November 4, 1995, a right-wing Orthodox Jew, Yigal Amir, fatally shot Rabin because he disagreed with Rabin's moderate policies. Currently, the prime minister of Israel is Ehud Olmert, who represents Kadima, a more centrist party founded by Ariel Sharon. But there are other groups, like the Likud party, that take a more extreme view about maintaining Israel as a Jewish state. Zionists want to see the modern state of Israel continue to gain more land and more power. For them the military is a means to achieve their ends. What stands between them and their Zionist vision are the Arab people that surround them from the north, the east, and the south; the Lebanese, the Syrians, and the Palestinians.

There's a third group we could talk about, and that's Christian fundamentalists. For the Islamic extremists, the Qur'an must be read, analyzed, and even memorized. Reciting its words is a holy act. For orthodox Jews, the Hebrew Bible, the Tanak—a term representing the three parts of the Hebrew Bible (Torah, Neviim, Kethuvim; the law, the prophets, and the writings)—is the word of God. It is to be reverenced; it is to be studied, memorized, and recited. The scrolls themselves are sacred and treated as such. Christian fundamentalists reverence the Bible in the same way. They cherish the leather-bound, gold-gilded pages of the book and consider it sacred. Its words are to be read as coming directly from the mouth of God. The whole thing is equally inspired and every aspect of it is to be believed as if one's eternal destiny depended on it. Whatever it is deemed to say about any aspect of life must be held to be literally true no matter how inconceivable it might seem. Christian fundamentalists in the US see their country as a Christian nation and strive to get everyone else to recognize the original intentions of the "founding fathers" to build a Christian nation "under God." They want their view of science and sexual morality to be taught in the schools. They want civic society to uphold their standards of decency. They want US foreign policy to be guided by their Zionist views, which they think will fulfill the prophecies of the Bible. The scariest part of Christian fundamentalism is, although they do not tend to be militant themselves, they consider the US military to be their tool to bring the Christian empire to the world.

In all of these areas of the world, moderate voices are working at the task of getting along. At times that can seem like anti-religious groups are working to shape society. Those are times that the balance begins to shift to the opposite extreme. In the middle are the moderates, both religious and secular, who are trying to find ways for well-meaning people to build societies based on peace and justice for all people.

It is not easy to be a moderate centrist. It can seem like people are middle-of-the-road because they can't make up their minds which side they are on. It's like they don't believe in anything or have any commitments and just accept some loose set of principles. But that's not the case. It takes more work and intelligence to understand both sides of the issue and to refrain from becoming swept up by the extremes on either side. This extends to the basic decisions each of us makes about everyday moral choices.

It's rather easy to let someone else do your thinking for you. All you have to do is listen to what they say and then do it. Everything is black & white, right or wrong. Ethical choices for Christian fundamentalists could be as simple as asking, "What would Jesus do?" In fact, you don't really need to worry about any of that, as long as you've had a conversion experience. You don't need to be terribly concerned about the world because it and the devil are all going to burn soon anyway.

The trouble with being a moderate, however, is knowing where the boundaries are. If it's not a sin to drink alcohol, then what's to keep me from getting drunk regularly? If sex is permissible beyond procreation, then why shouldn't I live my life getting my jollies anyway I want? If I have freedom to interpret my faith and make personal choices, who's to tell me my beliefs and way of life are wrong?

We begin to figure that out for ourselves by coming to understand how human culture works. We then ask ourselves what are our values that transcend culture, those values humans have the most in common around the world. The more local the custom is--the more bound something is to our particular culture—the greater the tendency for it to be of less moral consequence. It may still be important to us and our community. But it is unlikely that it is something we should use to judge the character or value of others, try to impose on all people, or follow in some slavish way. Clothing styles, personal appearance, forms of music and art, manner of speech, etiquette, eating practices – these are all areas of life for which people in different cultures develop local customs. They may seem very important to people. In fact, extremists tend to make these things a priority and a test of allegiance to a particular religious worldview.

Our choices for how we think and act, first of all, should be based on how they affect the quality of our lives. Are we doing things that enhance our lives or are they potentially destructive? Do they give us immediate gratification but have long term detrimental consequences for what we want to achieve in life? Will the person we are ten to twenty years from now be grateful to the person we are now for the choices we make?

Secondly, our choices affect the people around us. We should be sensitive to whether our actions have a negative impact on others. We have a responsibility as members of the human race to live our lives in ways that at least do not hurt the people with whom we come into contact but also have a positive contribution to their quality of life and sense of well-being. At times that may mean voluntarily and temporarily giving up what might otherwise be something good for ourselves in order to do a greater good for someone else. In most cases, those expressions of love for others do not diminish ourselves but enhance and help develop the person we are becoming.

Thirdly, the way we choose to live life should have the least negative effect possible on the larger world of which we are a part and seek to have the greatest positive contribution possible to the welfare of people everywhere and also for life in general on our planet. All of this has to be in balance in our lives.

You could say that the best thing I could do to prevent harm to others and the planet is not to exist. But your human life has intrinsic value and has the potential to benefit the quality of life of others. We all should expect individual members of the human community to respect their own value to the whole, to do what's needed to pursue one's own aspirations, and to have the right to make use of a reasonable share of the world's resources.

The flourishing human life is characterized by freedom, on the one hand, and personal commitments on the other. We serve others but do so voluntarily. We suffer for others, but we do so in ways that benefit rather than diminish us. In all these choices, we hold up to ourselves for imitation the best of human ideals. For many cultures this is an expression of the divine life, a godlike existence, a participation in the holy presence of God.

The human family can get along in the world but not by falling into the trap of cultural ideologies and religious fanaticism, fundamentalism, and extremism. The way to make the world better is not by trying to convince everyone in the world to adopt the faith and practice of your group, movement, or religion. It doesn't work to say, "The world would be at peace if everyone would just be like me." We have to realize what we have in common as humans is the destructive tendency to think local histories, customs, and traditions are values that everyone must share. Or that what we think is the standard for all others. By that way of thinking, therefore, it becomes legitimate to use coercion, force, and even violence in order to superimpose those values on others. Wherever these extremist views happen, they should be suppressed by more moderate voices. The vocal minority should not have the last word in how the world is run. A broad education and cultural awareness is the only way to help people progress to see how their lives interact with others.

When we read about Jesus, the Apostle Paul, and others in the New Testament, we can see the ways in which early Christianity sought to include marginalized people, to break down cultural and ethnic barriers, and to make a qualitative difference in the lives of men and women. In this way Christianity was focused on bringing people together into God's kingdom. The message about Jesus was meant to be good news to all people everywhere. It was a ministry of redemption and reconciliation. It was a message about peace and the justice of God. The vast majority of people want these things in their lives and in the world. But there are some who don't want that. They want their way and only their way for all—or else. In the course of marginalizing those people we must not trample on the rights and freedoms of others. It takes all of us working together to achieve this task of getting along. We can't just sit around waiting for God to do it for us. God expects humans in all parts of the world to discern God's voice, to make good choices, and be on our best behavior for the benefit of all.

In a previous post I talked about beginning to learn Arabic. Recently, I was asked twice about how my Arabic is coming along. My answer was, "I've come a long way, but I have a long way to go."

The best thing I did was start with the Alif Baa book and DVDs. I went through it carefully and did the exercises. It took several weeks and many hours, but I began to learn the various shapes of the letters and how they connected together. Most importantly, I began to learn the difference between those letters that are similar and how to pronounce or hear the "velarized" forms. I regret that I didn't continue practicing handwriting and want to get a book on Arabic handwriting. I also didn't finish the whole book. I've had to go back and study the last sections (about taa marbuta for example).

I tried to use the next book in that series, Al Kitaab. I was not able to use that book studying on my own. It was not helpful to me at all, and I eventually returned it to the library. Maybe after i progress further I might be able to gain from it.

The second best thing I did was to start with Rosetta Stone. I purchased a three-month subscription for the online version. It worked fairly well for me. Only one time did I have a technical problem. It may have had something to do with an update they were making to the online version. Over the course of a weekend I was not able to go on to the next screen. It just wouldn't load. I suppose it's understandable that I received no response from tech support. On Monday after their update everything worked fine again. I dutifully reported that my problem had been resolved. Still, it would have been nice to have received some acknowledgment from tech support.

I get the idea that Rosetta Stone wants people to learn a language in a "natural" way by seeing images that provide a linguistic context. The focus for language study is the interaction with people in typical settings. From what I can tell, Rosetta Stone has "set in stone" one set of images and cultural interactions and then translated that into many, if not most, of the world's languages. There is something very artificial about that. The images, while showing people from various ethnic groups, represent a particular kind of urban, western culture. It can seem odd or even ridiculous at times to see blond, white people talking about situations that are quite foreign to most of Arab culture. At least one can say Rosetta Stone fails to include anything that is unique to the cultures which formed the languages they teach. They should have used images to teach languages framed within the culture of that language. Not every culture looks the same and interacts in the same way with the same kinds of linguistic features.

Many people study a second language as an adult and by that time have learned something about how languages work. As a child we learn language through repeated encounters with language over many years. A more sophisticated -- and quicker -- approach is to understand how a language works in comparison to a known language. To my mind, both of these approaches are important aspects of learning a language. I think Rosetta Stone could do much more to help people learn language if they provided more tools for learning, such as grammatical explanations, vocabulary learning modules, and more interactive features that build on concepts.

The other problem for Arabic is that Rosetta Stone seems to be teaching Modern Standard Arabic. That makes sense to teach the form of Arabic most widely used for formal communication. Since no one actually talks that way to each other, it has a whole other type of artificiality to it. I would love to use Rosetta Stone to learn Eastern (Levantine, Syrian) colloquial Arabic. Many people seem to focus on one of the other "dialects." In order for Rosetta Stone to fulfill its function, it would need to develop the series for each one of these Arabic colloquial dialects -- as happens with Spanish for Latin America, for example.

The third great benefit to me has been good dictionaries. The Arabic Practical Dictionary (Awda & Smith) has been immensely helpful. It is an Arabic-English and English-Arabic dictionary. The Arabic section is alphabetical, which makes it easy to find the various forms of words irrespective of their root words. I've also started using the Hans Wehr Ararbic-English dictionary, which is based on the root words. It can make it a little more challenging to find words, if you can't figure out what the three (or sometimes more) radical root letters are.

I feel I'm floundering a bit now. I continue to work at different aspects of Arabic using the Cowan Modern Literary Arabic and Wightwick/Gaafar Arabic Verbs & Essentials of Grammar. I'm not making steady progress through the language like I felt I was making with Rosetta Stone (I stopped using it after the initial three months was up).

I have tried a few language-learning social websites like italki and VoxSwap. I've been unsuccessful finding anyone who actually wants to learn English from me and teach me Arabic. I think most people are just using it the web sites to chat with people around the world. I even received an email from some woman.

I AM [.....] IN SEARCH OF A MAN WHO UNDERSTANDS THE MEANING OF LOVE AS TRUST AND FAITH IN EACH OTHER RATHER THAN ONE WHO SEES LOVE AS ONLY A WAY OF FUN BUT A MATURE MAN WITH NICE VISSION OF WHAT THE WORLD IS ALL ABOUT AND AFTER READING YOUR PROFILE I TOOK INTEREST IN YOU SO REPLY TO ME

I don't know how she could discern all of that from my profile. My wife could set her straight about a few things.

I hope soon to find an online tutor to work with over the next three or four months before traveling to Palestine. I have looked at some online sites, like Myngle , but I'm not confident that someone I find on the internet will be professional and worth the amount people are charging for the service.

There are two online services I'm finding extremely helpful for the study of classical Arabic (MSA). One is the UK web site Natural Arabic. For $7 a month or $1.75 per article, you can read an Arabic text that is representative of contemporary or classical Arabic literature. You can view the Arabic either with vowels or vowel-less and also in transliteration. The English contains a choice between a good English translation or a word-for-word translation. The two texts are linked so that clicking on a word in one highlights that word in that text and in the parallel text. You hear the Arabic in a clear voice. You can either either each word individually by clicking on the word or using key strokes, or you can play the audio of the whole article and follow the red highlighting. I need to use Internet Explorer to use the site, though there are directions for how to make it work in Firefox.

Last week I happened across a web site for a software package called ArabBible . The complete Arabic New Testament (Van Dyke translation) is the base text. This is an incredible amount of information. Every word is provided with detailed information about the word, its meaning, root, various forms, function, etc. For most verbs you can see a chart of its complete conjugation. Since I'm going to be teaching a New Testament class to Arabic-speaking people through an interpreter, this will be an invaluable tool for me to study the Arabic New Testament and learn classical Arabic as I go. And you can hear a good, clear voice reciting the Arabic either a verse or a chapter at a time. Another terrific feature is the ability to print out a vocabulary list for a complete chapter. The cost is only $89. There are a few oddities. Perhaps it's my screen resolution, but some parts of the software's interface don't line up quite right. The author, an evangelical Christian, has chosen to change the Van Dyke translation and not use Allah but the generic al-Ilaah. The notes on each verse seem to also contain comments about the Greek text. I haven't read through very many of these notes yet, but I don't put much confidence in the author's understanding of Greek. That judgment might be too hasty. All in all, this is a fantastic tool for studying classical Arabic.

I have the book on Eastern Arabic and have gone through it a little bit with the accompanying mp3 files. It's difficult to go through it by oneself. One day I actually took some stuffed animals (a Pooh bear and a Valentine's bear) and pretended they were speaking Arabic to each other. Right now I have no other way to practice.

Like I say, I have a long way to go. So far I'm enjoying the journey and continue to be excited about learning Arabic and coming to understand more about Arab culture.

I'm beginning to think I might try to locate myself in Bethlehem rather than Ramallah during my sabbatical Fall semester in Palestine. I've applied to participate in the Scholar's Program at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute for Theological Studies . This will enable me to continue my research project and locate me close to the Bethlehem Bible College , where I expect to be teaching a class during the semester. I still hope to travel frequently to Ramallah, especially on the weekends to attend the Friend's meeting there Sunday morning.

It would really top off my sabbatical plans to be at Tantur. However, it would cost me more than I had originally budgeted when I was considering staying in the home of a family. I have yet to hear if I'm accepted and to see whether I can figure out the budget to make it work. Stay tuned.