Julia M. OBrien

With the start of a new semester, I’ve had to shift my direct attention away the West Bank/ Israel trip to courses, writing assignments, and speaking engagements.  But the realities I encountered in January aren’t fading away; instead, they are finding their way into all the work I’m doing.

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 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."

This semester, my students in the Introduction to Hebrew Bible/Old Testament class at LTS are working with new textbooks:  John Collins, A Short Introduction to the Hebrew Bible (Fortress, 2007) and Johanna van Wijk-Bos, Making Wise the Simple: The Torah in Christian Faith and Practice (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).  We also read from other sources (the Global Bible Commentary, the Women's Bible Commentary, the Eerdman's Dictionary of the Bible, and some internet pieces), but Collins and Bos have been our primary introductions to the Pentateuch.

In the spring 2010 semester at LTS, I'll be teaching a new course:  Violence and the Bible.

Every year since the late 1980's, I have assigned Phyllis Trible’s “Eve and Adam:  Genesis 2-3 Reread”  in introductory Bible courses.   From 1989-1997, my students were undergraduates at Meredith College, the women’s college from which Trible herself graduated in 1954.  Since 1997, the students to whom I’ve assigned Trible have been those preparing for theological vocations at Lancaster Theological Seminary.

Returning to the classroom after sabbatical is always a shock.  After months of focusing on my own interests and communing with others primarily via a computer screen, I'm now face-to-face with real people, responsible for helping them understand and respond to diverse perspectives on the Bible.

Thanks to all those who responded to my call for Psalms stuff. Here, I report on the array of objects we handled in our first Psalms class.

An excerpt from my Reading the Bible as an Adult project was republished (with modifications) in the Sept. 09 edition of Teaching the Bible, an e-pub for high school teachers provided by the Society of Biblical Literature.