Julia M. OBrien

A lot will happen in the next six weeks. 

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.

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?

It's easy to read the Bible as if it contained disembodied doctrine, eternal truths about the divine being and the cosmos floating above the mundane concerns of human living. But biblical materials were shaped by the people who wrote them--not only by their beliefs but also by the economies in which they lived.  And as ancient Israel's economy changed over time, so too did the assumptions and the agendas of the writers of the documents that we now have in the Bible.