The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth.

For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text.

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life.

The Puritans' sense of priorities in life was one of their greatest strengths. Putting God first and valuing everything else in relation to God was a recurrent Puritan theme.

In Puritan thinking, the Christian life was a heroic venture, requiring a full quota of energy.

The goal of Bible translation is: be transparent to the original text - to see as clearly as possible what the biblical authors actually wrote.