I have a piece up today in American Reformer (cross-posted also to The North American Anglican) explaining the rationale behind the name of The Joshua Program.
Here’s how it starts:
When St. Dunstan’s Academy considered naming our program for high school graduates after Moses’s longtime apprentice and eventual successor, Joshua, we had some reservations. The book of Joshua is one of the most controversial in the Bible, thanks to a brutal conquest narrative that one could accurately, if anachronistically, describe as ethnic cleansing. Even if we follow the main stream of Christian interpretation — which has tended to read the book spiritually and allegorically — “genocide your sins” was, we decided, too cavalier and much too “online” for our tastes. Nevertheless, we did settle on Joshua — and ultimately not in spite of the book’s notoriously challenging violence, but partly because of it.
