This is my second attempt at this post. The first time I lost everything, just as I was about to publish it.

I am just about to enter into my final week at St Andrews before returning for Christmas. It is strange to think that I have been here for a whole term. My Hebrew exam is now safely behind me. It went well, despite the fact that I probably spent more talking about revision than I actually spent doing it. All my essays have been handed in as well and now I can relax for the rest of the term.

It will be great to go home at the end of next week. I am feeling a bit threadbare at the moment and could benefit from a change of scene — even Stoke-on-Trent will do! — to help me feel a little less flat. Lord-willing I will also be able to have my computer repaired while I am at home, which will enable me to post some more longer posts, including one on Romans 4, which has been waiting on my hard drive for some time now.

I have done less reading over the last week. I have almost finished reading Cornelis van der Waal’s The Covenantal Gospel. It is not easy to arrive at an assessment of the value of this book, considering its age. Almost all of the insights of this book are extremely important ones, but they are all relatively familiar to me. I imagine that I have been exposed to many of these insights through people who originally received them from authors like van der Waal. I have appreciated this book and would recommend it to anyone wanting a solid treatment of the subject. James Jordan’s thoughts on the book are also useful (he encloses them in the book if you order through Biblical Horizons).

I have just finished reading the second book in Robertson Davies’ Cornish Trilogy, What’s Bred in the Bone. I read Davies’ Deptford Trilogy about a year ago, and I have enjoyed reading the Cornish Trilogy more (thanks are due to Paul Baxter, who first introduced me to Davies’ work). This probably is largely a result of the fact that my reading of the Deptford Trilogy was interrupted on a number of occasions and also put on hold for a period of time; the Deptford trilogy seems to me to be the better of the two trilogies. I am pretty certain that I will reread both trilogies sometime in the future (I also hope to read the Salterton Trilogy sometime). I find Davies’ insight into human nature and the formation of character very interesting. The complex interweave of the various relationships and roles played by the characters in his novels and the manner in which he traces the unraveling of destinies over long time periods and the decisive actions, events and persons that have served to forge them are probably the features of his work that I find most compelling.