Professor Blount's most recent publications include a volume edited along with Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, Making Room At The Table:  An Invitation To Multicultural Worship (WJK, 2000), Then The Whisper Put On Flesh:  New Testament Ethics In An African American Context (Abingdon, 2001) and Struggling With Scripture, with Walter Brueggemann and William Placher (WJK, 2002).  He has also completed an article entitled, "Teaching Across Borders: Experimental Biblical Pedagogy."  It is awaiting publication in the journal SEMEIA.  He has been working jointly with Dr. Gary W. Charles, pastor of the Old Presbyterian Meeting House in Alexandria, VA, on Preaching Mark In Two Voices (Westminster John Knox, 2003). Professor Blount will do the John Albert Hall Lectures for the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society at the University of Victoria in Vancouver, Canada in the Fall of 2003.  Sometime during this period he anticipates the publication of the Discipleship Study Bible by Westminister John Knox Press.  He is an editor along with Professors W. Sibley Towner, Bruce Birch, and Gail R. O'Day.  He has also written the introduction and notes for Mark and Matthew.  Currently, he is preparing a commentary on the Book of Revelation (WJK).  

Brian K. Blount, associate professor of New Testament, earned his M.Div. from Princeton in 1981, when he received the Edler Garnet Hawkins Award for Scholastic Excellence. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Dr. Blount served for six years as pastor of Carver Presbyterian Church in Newport News, Virginia, before returning to academia in 1988 as a Woodruff Fellow at Emory University. Within the field of New Testament studies, he specializes in the Kingdom of God language in the Gospel of Mark, New Testament ethics, the relationship of the New Testament to the Black church, and Revelation.

His recent publications include Cultural Interpretations: Reorienting New Testament Criticism  and Go Preach! Mark’s Kingdom Message and the Black Church Today. Forthcoming are a book on New Testament ethics for Abingdon Press and a commentary on Revelation for Westminster John Knox Press. Brian K. Blount 110 Stockton Street  497-7836 brian.blount@ptsem.edu 

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

By Charles C. Mann

I’m a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, in which he provides a sweeping and provocative examination of North and South America prior to the arrival of Christopher Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched but so wonderfully written that it’s anything but exhausting to read. With his follow-up, 1493, Mann has taken it to a new, truly global level. Building on the groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby (author of The Columbian Exchange and, I’m proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer), Mann has written nothing less than the story of our world: how a planet of what were once several autonomous continents is quickly becoming a single, “globalized” entity.

Mann not only talked to countless scientists and researchers; he visited the places he writes about, and as a consequence, the book has a marvelously wide-ranging yet personal feel as we follow Mann from one far-flung corner of the world to the next. And always, the prose is masterful. In telling the improbable story of how Spanish and Chinese cultures collided in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, he takes us to the island of Mindoro whose “southern coast consists of a number of small bays, one next to another like tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato, tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue to do so until we are finally living on one integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth. Whether or not the human instigators of all this remarkable change will survive the process they helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and revelatory book, an open question.