Julia M. OBrien

It's a common plot of novels and movies:  while the superstitious public clings to outdated religious beliefs, people in power compete for access to ancient manuscripts which reveal the powerful, if shocking, truth about the past.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.

When folks talk about the Bible as literature, they often have in mind the importance of biblical literacy for understanding fiction and poetry:  the Bible as background.  Who is the Absalom of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom?  What biblical currents run throughout Yeats’ “The Magi” and “The Second Coming”?  Was Toni Morrison the first person to name a book Song of Solomon?

I love to read. I read non-fiction for my professional work as a biblical scholar, and the information and new perspectives transform the way I understand the biblical text.  Learning about the pervasive malnutrition of ancient diets and the infant mortality rate in ancient Israel (1 out of 2 children died before the age of 5) changed the way I approach Genesis, the prophets—indeed all of the Bible.  I occasionally read popular non-fiction, too--related to the Bible (The Year of Living Biblically) or to issues that I care about (The Way we Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap).  Non-fiction changes my thinking in useful ways.

But I am passionate about novels.  I read them whenever I can.

My daughter, a college senior, saw the new Harry Potter movie at midnight last night.

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.

Even as booksellers and English teachers lament that Americans don't read, the phenomenon of the book club just keeps getting bigger.  Every month, book clubs gather in small town libraries, in independent book shops, and at almost every Barnes and Noble in the nation.  Oprah makes and breaks careers by picking her book club insiders.  The websites of major publishers pitch their wares to the book club crowd, sometimes targeting African American readers or evangelical Christians. A simple internet query for "book clubs" returns page after page of discussion questions (general and tailored to particular books) and guidelines for how to start a live or virtual book club of one's own.  Apparently there are a lot of people for whom reading and talking about reading matter.

 

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.

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.