Julia M. OBrien

Folks who actually read the book of Leviticus (there are a few) usually treat it as superstitious, outdated, odd.  After all, who today really needs details about sacrificial offerings that no one makes anymore or needs to be reminded not to sacrifice their children to other gods?   Don't mix the fibers in your clothes?  Don't seed your field with different kinds of seeds?  Don't get near a menstruating woman? Why bother reading this stuff if you're not interested in how people used to think?

There's nothing new about accessorizing with religion.  A quick stroll through most museums will make the point:  people have worn faith-based necklaces, rings, and amulets for millennia.

My life has been filled with books. My father, a U.C.C. pastor, always was reading 2 or 3 novels at a time and filled the shelves of our home with hundreds of volumes (including The Great Books series).  My mother, a 10th grade English teacher, piled textbooks and classics on the kitchen table after dinner, consulting them over and over as she meticulously graded papers.

April 21, 2009, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Hebrew Yom haShoah.   A time to remember the 6 million Jews who died in Nazi Germany, the day is a national memorial day in Israel and is observed around the world.

I'm a big fan of audiobooks.  I download titles from our county library to my .mp3 player and listen in the car.  Mostly, I listen to the works of Lee Smith, who sets moving stories in the American South, often tracing the contours of a family through numerous generations.

Listening to the tales aloud is a very different experience than reading the print versions. When I read, I often go too fast, pushing ahead to the gist of the material and unconsciously skipping a lot of it.  With an audiobook, I can't control the pace of the story.  Unless I choose to fast-forward, I have to listen at the speed the narrator (director?) has chosen.  And I have to listen carefully, since I can't flip back to re-read about characters. I hear more in the story than when I read silently, especially Smith's gift at capturing the nuances of different classes and regions within southern culture.

It’s almost a consensus among scholars (if such a thing is possible) that the concept of resurrection is absent from most of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (OT/HB).  The consensus goes something like this:

“Gorgeous gestures backed by a thousand years of tradition may not be much different from wars and other acts more stark and obvious in their capacity for violence.”

I came across this sentence while reading Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (Penguin, 1997), a novel about the experience of a Vietnamese daughter and mother living in Virginia in the 1970’s.