Ancient Hebrew Poetry

World Youth Day in Madrid

    World Christianity is a complex animal. So, of course, is world Judaism. Liberal formations matter less and less whereas evangelical Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism and even evangelical Judaism are surging. In order to understand why that is, it is essential to grasp something of the social and spiritual dynamics of events such as World Youth Day, which took place in Madrid this summer and counted 2 million participants. A Catholic event of the first order, it is a “We are the World” event. And who can say, with more authority than the Catholic Church, that “we are the world”? How does World Youth day “feel” in western Europe, a secularized region in the throes of re-enchantment?

Bertold Brecht’s Solution to the Current Crisis

    One of the things I miss at the moment is not having among my current face friends someone who is head over heels for Brecht. You have to be seriously messed up in a deep and ultimately positive way to appreciate Brecht. I cannot remember a time in which trust in government has been so low. Brecht’s famous poem, the allusions of which are obscure and somehow palpable at the same time 60 years later, is worth quoting and re-translating in our context. Suffice it to say that Brecht alludes to the Uprising of_1953_in_East_Germany.

Remembering Eugene Nida (1914-2011)

    Eugene Nida is a towering figure in the history of Bible translation. In good ways and bad, few people more than Nida impacted the way the Bible is “received” in the modern world – in what guise and in what form. Scholars of biblical literature are ignorant at their own peril of the contribution of Nida to the history of reception of the literature they study. After all, people read the Bible in translation. Biblical scholars do too, I’ve noticed, though they prefer literal translations, because they are “transparent to” the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek - i.e., said translations serve as crutches for those whose command of the biblical languages is weak.

Chris Heard’s Million-Dollar Questions

    Chris Heard asks a number of excellent questions, not just of those of us who teach introductory classes in biblical literature to university students, but of anyone inclined to read the Bible as a corpus crisscrossed by common themes and recurrent answers to life’s fundamental questions - even if some of the answers come in the form of questions left open with great stubbornness. Here is Chris Heard’s first question: What are the seven most important Old Testament events/characters about which undergraduates (mostly first-year students) should learn in an introductory class? Below the fold, an off-the-cuff answer. I limit myself to three persons of interest.

Why they teach biblical literature at MIT and Yale

    Courses in biblical literature are increasingly available at community, technical, liberal arts colleges, and state universities across the English-speaking world. It is understood that the ability to interpret and interact with biblical literature and the history of its reception are essential skills of the well-equipped mind. Why? The Bible, whether or not one thinks of it as a resource for life today, is one of the main sources of our civilization. If you don’t know your way around the Bible, you don’t know your way around a perennial wellspring of your own culture.

Anna’s vacation: “I have everything I need”

    Ben Myers (of “Read more Barth, you b*****s!” fame) has a new set of online digs: the link. His inaugural post: reflections of his son James’ fear of rats. The post made me think of the very different words of my daughter Anna, now 8, on vacation on the Italian Riviera, at la casa valdese in Vallecrosia to be exact. She is there with her mamma helping her nonni move from Genova to their new home. Over two hundred boxes of books to move! Anna hasn't watched television, answered a phone, spoken in English, or eaten fast food or junk food for 14 days now. But she is happy and serene, with new found friends her age from France and Italy. “I have everything I need,” she says. Salt, sun, and sand. Slow food over thanksgiving. Family and friends. Yes, Anna, you have everything you need.

the wounds of the past that never heal

    Another great Italian film is about to come out: Ruggine. A great sound track, too. It’s not only because Valeria Solarino stars in it, though that doesn’t hurt. It’s the subject matter: the wounds of the past that never heal. They are so important because they are so determining.

    The most salient passage in the Bible evokes the Tree of Life of the Garden of Eden, re-situates it in the new heavens and the new earth, and says, “the leaves of the Tree are for the healing of the nations … nothing accursed will be there anymore” (Rev 22:2-3). The burden of apocalyptic literature is that of providing an alternative to the reflex of returning to the scene of the crime. Better said, the scene of the crime is evoked in the most universal of terms, and then transcended in the most universal of terms.

Free Porn brought to you by PETA

    Lindsay Beyerstein just wrote a post entitled: I’ve always said that PETA should be called “Pornographers for the ethical treatment of animals”. Is PETA really into porn?

Will the real N T Wrong please stand up?

    I noticed this morning that someone accessed a post on this blog from a blog I thought was no longer available: Emerging from Babel. Its successor blog, to my surprise, is also (again?) available, now titled: all songs lead back t’ the sea. Imagine my surprise to discover that the author of these blogs now is: ntWrong. The man gets around.

Anthropology and the Study of the Bible: The Importance of Learning Hebrew

    Mary Douglas (1921-2007) was an anthropologist of the first rank. The truth she told was enormous. She knew that ritual is about the management of identity; she also knew, since she was a field anthropologist, that you have to learn Hebrew if you want to plumb the depths of the system of signs¹ we find in the Bible.