In a meeting at the church last October we started a discussion on inviting an interesting Author/Speaker for a weekend of enlightenment for the community. The first person to come to my mind was Dr. Randall Price. I had read a number of his books whose topics are related to Israel, inclusive of past, present and future. We left the meeting without talking a lot about it, but I thought I would try to contact him just to see where it led.
Within a couple of weeks, I heard back from his administrative assistant, and sure enough, he does visit churches for conferences. By the time we worked out dates and various details it was early December. Interestingly enough, he was to publish his new book titled "Unholy War America, Israel and Radical Islam" that month. Needless to say, we thought this could be an interesting weekend, and we settled on April 21st through the 23rd.
He was to give four presentations, first was "Unholy War and the role of Islam in Terrorism". The second was "Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls", third was "Israel and the Palestinian Conflict" and the last was the "Battle over Jerusalem and the Future Jewish Temple".
Dr. Price holds a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has done graduate study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and conducted archeological excavation in Israel with the University of Texas. He also is a Th.M. graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary.
As the conference coordinator, it was interesting to watch it all unfold. My wife Sherrie and I also had the privilege of going to dinner with Dr. Price on a couple of occasions, and we got to ask him all the questions I wanted without having to stand in line. To be honest, it was quite an honor, and was worth all the administrative troubles that go into such an endeavor. I also had the opportunity to go live on channel 10 TV at noon on Monday the 22nd with Dr. Price. He was interviewed live and they asked me some questions about the conference, so I got to watch the noon news from the catbird seat.
He gave PowerPoint presentations each evening, and it was amazing how much information he crammed into an hour each night. The two most interesting topics to me were the information on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and fundamental Islam. As it turns out, Dr. Price is a very down to earth person, but a walking reference on Israel.
Like many others, I have read up on Islam since September 11th, yet most of it is still a mystery to me. Something I would not have said before, but now know that the god of Islam and the God of Christians is not the same. Muslims in the Middle East see Islam in a different light than is generally viewed in the west, it serves a much more inclusive and militant role as we have recently witnessed.
From a literary point of view, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide an interesting look back to life before Christ. The Dead Sea Scrolls refers to a set of about 500 leather manuscripts and papyri discovered in caves and ancient ruins of the wilderness of Judea. The first of these discoveries took place in 1947 when a group of shepherd boys stumbled upon a group of scrolls in a cave not far from the ancient site of Qumran. Dr. Price explained the significance of these documents and that most of them are copies of the Old Testament, or commentaries on it. He also did a film documentary with the shepard that found the first scroll at the original site. Dr. Price will be conducting another dig at Qumran looking for more scrolls during the month of August 2002.
If anyone is interested, I have the audio tapes from each session.