In The Nanny Diaries a college grad tells her story of taking a happenstance job as a nanny for a set of awful parents, phrased in anthropological terminology, which made it all the more interesting.

The tools of cross-cultural anthropology, even in New York can help one understand what is going on, who is doing what, why they're doing it, and what they mean when they talk.

Last night in a class I'm taking we were discussing some cultural difficulties in studying the Bible and how we've made it worse with modern methods.

We try to prove the Bible by our current Western cultural views of what it means to be historically accurate, scientifically accurate, and non-contradictory.

But in an ancient near-east they didn't see the world the way we do, or think in the ways we do.

One specific example could be in quotations. There are different quotes of Jesus' sermon on the mount, for example.

What if more important than repeating a teacher's exact words, you were to remember specifically what was meant when they spoke? Arguable, you could more accurately passing on the teaching.

This doesn't lessen the authority of the scripture, but it makes it much much more interesting, and more fun, and more work - instead of critiquing a given passage by our standards for literature or history text-books, we venture into another culture in another time.

We have translations from the language from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek into English, but we cannot assume that the culture, worldview, and traditions have also been translated. That work is still left for us to do.

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