Julia M. OBrien

I've just encountered powerful curriculum on Joshua.  It's entitled Joshua:  A Journey of Faith and is the 2009-2010 Horizons Bible Study for Presbyterian women.

The first of many unsettling experiences during the LTS West Bank/Israel trip was my introduction to the Wall.  While I had read much about the "separation wall" between Israel and the Occupied Territories and even seen photos from friends, I wasn't prepared for the reality.

From January 6 to January 25, I joined my colleague Anabel Proffitt in leading a group of 21 students from our institution through the West Bank and Israel.  I've recently returned, my camera full of pictures and my head full of realities to process and responses to formulate.  In the next few weeks, I'll be reporting on my evolving experience of the trip.

I've recently returned from co-leading a group of seminarians on a 17-day trip to the West Bank and Israel.  It was an intense experience, and I'll soon start blogging and uploading photos.

A lot will happen in the next six weeks. 

It's a common plot of novels and movies:  while the superstitious public clings to outdated religious beliefs, people in power compete for access to ancient manuscripts which reveal the powerful, if shocking, truth about the past. Think The DaVinci Code.  Indiana Jones movies. Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. Irving Wallace's The Word.

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.

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.

It's one thing to acknowledge that the book of Psalms is written as poetry.  It's quite another to consider what difference the poetic style makes to interpretation of the Psalms. What if we encountered Psalm 139's claim that "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" not in private devotion or from the mouth of a lector in church but in a context more like that of def jam?  This great piece is Marty McConnell's "Instructions for a Body."