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.

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.

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

One of the fascinating, if maddening, aspects of biblical interpretation is that the story embraced by one community as the greatest good news is often rejected by another as the worst bad news. Take the Exodus story, for example.

In his book America's Prophet:  Moses and the American Story, Bruce Feiler makes a bold claim: "Moses is bigger than Jesus."

How to respond to the Christian tradition's blaming Eve for The Fall of Humanity?

Every year since the late 1980's, I have assigned Phyllis Trible’s “Eve and Adam:  Genesis 2-3 Reread”  in introductory Bible courses.   From 1989-1997, my students were undergraduates at Meredith College, the women’s college from which Trible herself graduated in 1954.  Since 1997, the students to whom I’ve assigned Trible have been those preparing for theological vocations at Lancaster Theological Seminary.

Returning to the classroom after sabbatical is always a shock.  After months of focusing on my own interests and communing with others primarily via a computer screen, I'm now face-to-face with real people, responsible for helping them understand and respond to diverse perspectives on the Bible.

In a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, Karen Armstrong and Richard Dawkins respond to the question, "Where does evolution leave God?"   Not surprisingly, Armstrong answers in a way that respects religious belief, while Dawkins uses the opportunity to further disparage religion.