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Book Review!
Oct. 18th, 2008 08:59 pmSo Drew and I went to Borders today for the first time in forever, and I bought three books. (YAY! Buying books never gets old.) One of the three was A.J. Jacobs' book The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. I'm fascinated by theology anyway, but I also teach the Bible as literature to my 9th graders and am about to start that unit, so I thought it would be an educational and timely (if irreverent) book to read right now.
I started reading it around 4:30 and just finished it. So. Good. Funny, yes, but it was also deeply respectful and unexpectedly touching. It was also incredibly well researched, and it was clear that he really tried to approach the process even-handedly. I've done a ton of research over the past couple of years, but I still learned a lot from reading this book and was vastly entertained. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Here are two excerpts about how intimidating this process was for Jacobs, and they capture perfectly how I've felt about teaching the Bible:
I felt torn, anxious about my approach, my monumental ignorance, my lack of preparation, about all of the inevitable blunders I'd make. And the more I read, the more I absorbed the fact that the Bible isn't just another book. It is the book of books, as one of my Bible commentaries calls it. I love my encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia hasn't spawned thousands of communities based on its words. It hasn't shaped the actions, values, deaths, love lives, warfare, ad fashion sense of millions of people over three millennia. No one has been executed for translating the encyclopedia into another language, as was William Tyndale when he published the first widely distributed English-language edition of the Bible. No president has been sworn in with the encyclopedia. It's intimidating, to say the least. (13)
I'm poring over religious study books, desperately trying to get a handle on this [specific Biblical] topic and every other. My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads. (29)
That last excerpt made me laugh out loud in recognition.
Anyway, I thought some of you might also be interested, so I thought I'd spread my love of this book over here.
I started reading it around 4:30 and just finished it. So. Good. Funny, yes, but it was also deeply respectful and unexpectedly touching. It was also incredibly well researched, and it was clear that he really tried to approach the process even-handedly. I've done a ton of research over the past couple of years, but I still learned a lot from reading this book and was vastly entertained. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Here are two excerpts about how intimidating this process was for Jacobs, and they capture perfectly how I've felt about teaching the Bible:
I felt torn, anxious about my approach, my monumental ignorance, my lack of preparation, about all of the inevitable blunders I'd make. And the more I read, the more I absorbed the fact that the Bible isn't just another book. It is the book of books, as one of my Bible commentaries calls it. I love my encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia hasn't spawned thousands of communities based on its words. It hasn't shaped the actions, values, deaths, love lives, warfare, ad fashion sense of millions of people over three millennia. No one has been executed for translating the encyclopedia into another language, as was William Tyndale when he published the first widely distributed English-language edition of the Bible. No president has been sworn in with the encyclopedia. It's intimidating, to say the least. (13)
I'm poring over religious study books, desperately trying to get a handle on this [specific Biblical] topic and every other. My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads. (29)
That last excerpt made me laugh out loud in recognition.
Anyway, I thought some of you might also be interested, so I thought I'd spread my love of this book over here.
