Julia M. OBrien

Over at the Lingamish blog, David Ker has been talking about marriage and about gender roles within it.

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.

The August 23, 2009, issue of The New York Times Magazine was devoted to how women are faring around the world—their political status, economic standing, and health.

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.

My daughter turns 21 today. In contemporary American culture, that’s a significant milestone. As of today, she can drink alcohol legally and the cost of her car insurance decreases significantly. She’s very excited about the former and I about the latter, but I’m sure there are other legal dimensions of turning 21 that neither of us has thought about yet.

This summer has not been kind to my backyard garden.  After a few weeks of prolific production, my squash and cucumber plants succumbed to powdery mildew.  Now, just as they are supposed to ripen in full glory, my tomatoes (the bread and butter of my garden) are waging war with late blight.  It’s been too wet here in south central Pennsylvania.  Not hot enough.

My husband and I recently watched Connie and Carla, a 2004 comedy starring Nia Vardalos and Toni Collette.

I've been learning more about the Changing Lives through Literature program, in which "criminal offenders with charges ranging from drug violations to assault with a deadly weapon read and discuss literature as a condition of their probation."  In the program, offenders join judges and others in a democratic discussion of literature.

The group's website is filled with testimonies of how discussing literature in a group can lead to transformation:

I just published a new session in my Reading the Bible as an Adult project:  Bathsheba, Tamar, Absalom, Solomon:  David's Family Curse? The entry deals primarily with the trans-generational dynamics of 2 Samuel 11-18, how the themes of David's later life spill over into those of his family.  I talk about David's fukú , the language that Junot Díaz  uses in his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to describe a family curse. But there's a lot more to discuss  in these stories of David and his children, including the way that different people and different cultures think about rape.