Julia M. OBrien

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

I've never thought of Jesus as meek and mild, but I also never imagined Jesus the way I saw him depicted on a billboard in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, a few years ago.

Do you have trouble staying asleep?  Doze off just fine but in a few hours find yourself wide awake, ready for conversation, a little TV, maybe a snack?

According to William Holladay, you're in good company.  You may be experiencing what ancient people knew well: segmented sleep.

Last week, two colleagues from Elizabethtown College and I took a field trip to a reproduction of the biblical Tabernacle.  It's housed in the Mennonite Information Center in Lancaster, PA-- close to Amish tourist sites, a Target, and two outlet malls.

Mark Goodacre, Associate Professor in the Religion Department at Duke University, has developed a New Testament podcast.  He describes it as "condensed content from an academic perspective for everyone interested in historical approaches to the New Testament.

In an earlier blog, I suggested that the Old Testament is important for more than just providing background. Why else should people read the OT?

A lot of folks treat the Old Testament as "background" reading for something else.  For Christians, it's treated as the prequel to the New Testament, the part you have to read in order to understand the stuff you want to read. Who is Melchizedek and why does the book of Hebrews link him to Jesus?  Why was circumcision important to Jews of the first century?  What does atonement mean?  What's a covenant? The Old Testament offers the answers for the New Testament reader who wants to know.

My main complaint about The Shack is that it isn't very interesting as a story. The book starts out well enough, with an interesting (if disturbing) plot, and I find myself wanting to know what has happened to Missy, the main character's daughter.  I am ready for characters to be developed, details to be filled in, the mystery to be solved.  I am ready for something to happen. 

April 21, 2009, is Holocaust Remembrance Day, in Hebrew Yom haShoah.   A time to remember the 6 million Jews who died in Nazi Germany, the day is a national memorial day in Israel and is observed around the world.

It’s almost a consensus among scholars (if such a thing is possible) that the concept of resurrection is absent from most of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible (OT/HB).  The consensus goes something like this: