Julia M. OBrien

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.

I've just had an article published in the on-line journal The Bible and Interpretation.  It calls for biblical scholars to start talking more about why people should care about the Bible, not relying on the fact that they historically have.

The second edition of my Readings series volume on Nahum has just been released by Sheffield Phoenix Press.

I ended my last post with a research question:  how much religion would I see reflected in the book/magazine section of my suburban supermarket?

I just read an article about the huge success of the children's book series The Little Golden Books. According to an article by Claudia Anderson, Simon and Schuster first published the books in 1942, but their real success came when they hit the grocery stores.

In 1947, the Little Goldens appeared in supermarkets. Available and affordable in towns too small to have a bookstore, they democratized quality picture books for children. By 1959, more than 150 titles had sold over a million copies each. . .The Poky Little Puppy, illustrated by Gustaf Tenggren, was on its way to becoming the best-selling English-language children's picture book of all time.

Thinking about the role of the grocery store in disseminating one kind of literature got me thinking about its role in the religious lives of the people whom it serves.

In the May 29, 2009 issue of The Chronicle Review, two articles underscored the power of literature to transform students' lives.  In "Life Stories Unlocked by Literature," Margot Mifflin invited us to witness a female haunted by rape find strength in reading Alice Sebold's Lucky and a male abused by a babysitter affirm his sexuality in response to Shelley Jackson's "My Body: A Wunderkammer."  In "Great Books 2.0," David Clemens introduced us to Joshua, jazzed up on the Great Books, convinced they are the "real deal."  In the classics, Clemens proclaims, students hungry for meaning feast on perennial questions of human existence-a repast far more wholesome and satisfying than the empty calories of an educational diet of multiculturalism and pop culture.

King David is on the entertainment circuit these days.  He's the focus of an off-Broadway musical, not so creatively titled "King David," now at the Promise Theater. He's already a TV regular,  starring in the NBC series Kings (see earlier blog post).

In all the media hype, he hasn't risen above the humble book.  Robert Pinsky's The Life of David was published in 2008.   For the literary-minded, there's a new version of his story by Robert Alter: The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel.  And to show that he doesn't take himself too seriously, David continues to appear as a vegetable version of himself in "Dave and the Giant Pickle" in the Veggie Tales series.

What accounts for David's timeless appeal?

In my academic writing, I speak often of feminism and patriarchy.  The terms are charged with emotion, as well as stereotypes.

A lot of people would embrace another f-word a lot faster than they would the label "feminist."  They associate feminists with angry women who run around burning bras and fanning hatred of men.  In my Women and the Bible class, I've often asked students to draw their stereotypes of a feminist.  The pictures are not pretty.

“Gorgeous gestures backed by a thousand years of tradition may not be much different from wars and other acts more stark and obvious in their capacity for violence.”

I came across this sentence while reading Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge (Penguin, 1997), a novel about the experience of a Vietnamese daughter and mother living in Virginia in the 1970’s.

 I just finished reading a book of poems by Lucille Clifton: Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems. BOA Editions, 2000).

Clifton's poems sometimes include humor, but they almost always speak the hard truth about the brokenness of the world.  In this collection, she writes powerfully about the death of her brother, dialysis, cancer, lynching, menopause, and racism.  The poems are short with no capitalization, but they are not small things.  Her words burn on the page.