Dr. Dale C. Allison Jr. of the Princeton Theological Seminary faculty will present the address “The Bible in an Age of Screens” as the 2018-19 Danforth Lecture at Hope College on Thursday, Nov. 1, at 4 p.m. in the Fried-Hemenway Auditorium of the Martha Miller Center for Global Communication.

The public is invited.  Admission is free.

Allison will examine how electronic devices are changing people and, as a result, how people read, comprehend and think about the Bible.

Allison is the Richard J. Dearborn Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.  His academic research has focused on the historical Jesus, the Gospel of Matthew, the Sayings Gospel (Q), early Jewish and Christian eschatology, inner-biblical exegesis, the history of the interpretation and application of biblical texts, and the Jewish Pseudepigrapha.

His book “Constructing Jesus” was selected as “Best Book Relating to the New Testament” for 2009-2010 by the Biblical Archaeology Society.  He served for several years as the main New Testament editor for de Gruyter’s international Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception, and has been on the editorial boards of New Testament Studies, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Horizons in Biblical Theology, Journal of Biblical Literature, and Review of Biblical Literature.

He has also written books on the Sermon on the Mount, George Harrison, religious experience in the modern world, and death and what might lie beyond.  He is currently working on a commentary of 4 Baruch and plans on writing one more big book on Jesus.

He is an ordained elder in the PCUSA.  He obtained his master’s degree and his doctorate from Duke University. 

The Danforth Lecture is sponsored by the Hope College Department of Religion with support from an endowment established by the Danforth Foundation of St. Louis, Missouri. The program was established by the foundation “to deepen and enlarge the religious dimension of the campus family through speakers who can reflect on the broad, interdenominational and yet positive sense of the Judeo-Christian perspectives of life and existence.”

Some of the many distinguished scholars who have visited the campus through the program in the past include  Dr. Lewis B. Smedes of Fuller Theological Seminary; Dr. Martin E. Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School; Dr. Nicholas Wolterstorff of Yale Divinity School; Dr. Diana Eck of Harvard University; Dr. James VanderKam of the University of Notre Dame; Dr. Oliver O’Donovan of the University of Edinburgh; Dr. John Stratton Hawley of Barnard College; Dr. Timothy George of Samford University’s Beeson Divinity School; and Dr. Ellen F. Davis of the Divinity School at Duke University.

The Martha Miller Center for Global Communication is located at 257 Columbia Ave., at the corner of Columbia Avenue and 10th Street.