Julia M. OBrien

Between attending sessions and meetings at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting, I’m living in Reading Lolita in Tehran:  A Memoir in Books.  I say “living in” because that’s how I interact with books.  I live in them and they live in me—some for a few days, some for decades.

In a recent  New York Times review of the new movie 2012, Manohla Dargis twice links the destruction-of-the-world movie with the Bible.

A recent New York Times article reports that the U.S. military has turned to a new resource  to help soldiers name and heal from the trauma of war:  the very old literature of Sophocles.

It's one thing to acknowledge that the book of Psalms is written as poetry.  It's quite another to consider what difference the poetic style makes to interpretation of the Psalms. What if we encountered Psalm 139's claim that "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" not in private devotion or from the mouth of a lector in church but in a context more like that of def jam?  This great piece is Marty McConnell's "Instructions for a Body."

This semester, my students in the Introduction to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament class at LTS are working with new textbooks:  John Collins, A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Fortress, 2007) and Johanna van Wijk-Bos, Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).  We also read from other sources (the Global Bible Commentary, the Women's Bible Commentary, the Eerdman's Dictionary of the Bible, and some internet pieces), but Collins and Bos have been our primary introductions to the Pentateuch.

Does it matter what order you read psalms?  Would it matter if Psalm 22 were really Psalm 122 instead?

Why bother reading the laws of the Bible if you're not going to live by them?