Julia M. OBrien

This weekend, my husband and I saw Julie and Julia (click for a link to the official website). The film is Nora Ephron's adaptation of two books: Julia Child's memoir My Life in France; and Julie Powell's Julie and Julia, which follows Powell's quest to prepare all 524 recipes in Childs' Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days and to blog about her experience.

The 40-year anniversary of the moon walk of Apollo 11 has me nostalgic.  I remember where I was and where I was headed on the evening of July 20, 1969.

It was the first night of a month-long, cross-country family car trip.  My father, who loved to travel, hatched the idea and planned the details with the help of AAA.  He and my mom bought a station wagon, topped it with a Sears luggage carrier, packed up all four kids, and headed out from North Carolina to California.  I was 11 at the time.

When you encounter a website that slaps the face of all you believe in, makes your blood pressure rise, and basically ticks you off, should you speak against it or ignore it in hopes that it withers from lack of attention?  That's the dilemma I face when I view the Visionary Daughters website.

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.

Columbia Pictures will release Year One on June 19th.  Starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, the comedy follows two hunter-gathers after they are kicked out of their tribe and embark on adventures throughout the ancient world.

A friend who saw the long version of the trailer noticed multiple references to the Bible and sent me the link:  http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/yearone/site/ (Look for "video")

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?

Old Testament scholars get excited when anyone pays attention to "our" documents.  So I was anxious to watch NBC's Kings, a contemporary story of David.  I hoped that viewers would be so enthralled that they would run right out and (re)read the accounts in 1 and 2 Samuel and heated conversations would break out around the coffee pot.  Maybe the series would be so successful that everyone would jump on the biblical-story-as-TV-series bandwagon, setting Esther in a racially-divided nation in which the heroine initially "passes" as an insider but ultimately stands up for "her" people in times of danger. I imagined Jacob's story as Dallas, siblings fighting over family money and Rebekah looking like Miss Ellie (or maybe Glenn Close).