Julia M. OBrien

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.

What good can come from challenging David's status as a hero?

I've just had an article published in the on-line journal The Bible and Interpretation.  It calls for biblical scholars to start talking more about why people should care about the Bible, not relying on the fact that they historically have.

When folks talk about the Bible as literature, they often have in mind the importance of biblical literacy for understanding fiction and poetry:  the Bible as background.  Who is the Absalom of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom?  What biblical currents run throughout Yeats’ “The Magi” and “The Second Coming”?  Was Toni Morrison the first person to name a book Song of Solomon?

An excerpt from my Reading the Bible as an Adult project was republished (with modifications) in the Sept. 09 edition of Teaching the Bible, an e-pub for high school teachers provided by the Society of Biblical Literature.

There's an interesting article this week in The Chronicle Review about the role of first person in writings in the Humanities.  It's primarily a review of Cynthia Franklin's Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today (University of Georgia Press) and a reiteration of her belief that scholars talking about their own experiences "may help to rehumanize the ailing humanities."

Last night at the Berks County (PA) Theology with a Twist, I spoke about "Violence and the Bible."  We had a good discussion, around tables and as a group.

I'm posting my talking points below.  Maybe they can generate conversation here as well.

(This post covers some of the same ground as my session on Jacob in Reading the Bible as an Adult but talks more about how the themes of the story resonate with me.)

It’s common to read the Jacob narrative (Genesis 25-36) as tracing the main character’s transformation.  According to a lot of folks, Jacob begins his life as trickster but several key events help him to change.  One is his experience of being on the receiving end of deception, when his uncle Laban manipulates him into taking not just one but two cousins and hatches one scheme after another to keep Jacob down on the sheep farm. The other episode seen as pivotal shows up in chs. 32 and 33: on the night before he is to face the brother he has wronged, Jacob wrestles with and prevails over a man whom he later perceives as God.  Not only Jacob’s name but his very character is altered by the experience, enabling him to reconcile with Esau.

That's one way of looking at this story.  But paying close attention to particular literary features of this narrative makes Jacob’s story look different-- less about change than about how themes established at the beginning of a life continue to weave throughout it.

When I started my website and blog, it was to help launch a larger project-- one originally called The Bible for Book Clubs and now Reading the Bible as an Adult. My hope was that addressing diverse topics on the blog would attract people to the site; once there, they would then learn about my project of reading the Bible as literature that engages life questions. Now, five months into the process, foreground and background are shifting.

There's an argument/debate going on among those who blog on the Bible (bibliobloggers) about why women haven't been making it into the top 50 list.  April DeConick has taken on the quest of promoting the work of female bloggers and is encouraging others to do the same.