Arthur Keefer - Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the Meaning of Life

Episode: In this episode, Dru Johnson explores Arthur Keefer's comparative work between wisdom and philosophical traditions. The Book of Proverbs and Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press) examines Proverbs alongside later Greek virtue development in moral philosophy, including recent iterations of virtue ethics. His most recent work—Ecclesiastes and the Meaning of Life in the Ancient World (CUP)—takes a similar tack by asking questions from contemporary and ancient "meaning of life" philosophies and seeing how Qohelet answers those quandaries (or doesn't).

Guest: (modified from Keefer's Academia.edu site) Dr. Arthur Keefer is Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Notre Dame Australia and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Divinity (Trinity College, Melbourne) in the field of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. He also serves as a Presbyterian Minister at The Scots' Church, Melbourne.

His research focuses on the interpretation of the HB/OT within its ancient Near Eastern context and in its relation to ancient and contemporary philosophy. He's the author of The Book of Proverbs and Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Ecclesiastes and the Meaning of Life in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Proverbs 1-9 as an Introduction to the Book of Proverbs (Bloomsbury, 2020). He co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Wisdom Literature  (Cambridge, 2022) and serves as Book Review Editor for the Journal of Theological Studies. He is currently producing long-term projects on OT ethics and the ethics of narrative.

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