To celebrate the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature’s annual conference in HarperOne’s hometown of San Francisco—we’ve put together a special eBook promotion. So, load up on your reading for the plane! Even if you can’t attend the conference, you can still get this “stack” of great e-books at a great price! Hurry! This offer expires on November 13, 2011.

10 great books! $3.99 each!

Here’s your chance to rediscover your favorite authors in an eBook format:

THE HISTORICAL JESUS by John Dominic Crossan
THE BIRTH OF CHRISTIANITY by John Dominic Crossan
GOD’S PROBLEM by Bart Ehrman
THE MEANING OF JESUS by Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright
DISCOVERING GOD by Rodney Stark
THE LOST HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY by Philip Jenkins
THE MISUNDERSTOOD JEW by Amy-Jill Levine
THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS OF JESUS by Marv Meyer
MORMON AMERICA by  Richard Ostling
WHY RELIGION MATTERS by Huston Smith

Hurry! This offer is good in the United States only from November 4-13, 2011.

You’ll find more information and links to purchase here. 

And, of course, we’re looking forward to seeing you at HarperOne’s SBL booth (536 & 537)—where you’ll find our new and classic print books at special prices throughout the conference.

Sincerely,

Laina Adler
Senior Director of Marketing
HarperOne

 

Taken at Pattee/Paterno Library

After the US Women’s World Cup loss, what better catharsis than to descend into the stacks of the library with my daughter? I needed to pick up some more Ruth references and she is researching Romans and Greeks (and their conflicts, marriage, and death traditions). Feel free to suggest bibliography for her!

 

Description

Although disability imagery is ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible, characters with disabilities are not. The presence of the former does not guarantee the presence of the later. While interpreters explain away disabilities in specific characters, they celebrate the rhetorical contributions that disability imagery makes to the literary artistry of biblical prose and poetry, often as a trope to describe the suffering or struggles of a presumably nondisabled person or community. This situation contributes to the appearance (or illusion) of a Hebrew Bible that uses disability as a rich literary trope while disavowing the presence of figures or characters with disabilities.

Isaiah 53 provides a wonderful example of this dynamic at work. The “Suffering Servant” figure in Isaiah 53 has captured the imagination of readers since very early in the history of biblical interpretation. Most interpreters understand the servant as an otherwise able bodied person who suffers. By contrast, Jeremy Schipper’s study shows that Isaiah 53 describes the servant with language and imagery typically associated with disability in the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature. Informed by recent work in disability studies from across the humanities, it traces both the disappearance of the servant’s disability from the interpretative history of Isaiah 53 and the scholarly creation of the able bodied suffering servant.

Features

• Launch of the brand new Biblical Refigurations series which offers fresh perspectives on the textual, cultural, and interpretative contexts of individual biblical characters
• Highlights the relevance of disability studies to the study of the biblical text
• Engages research in disability studies from across the humanities to illuminate a very familiar passage in biblical studies
• Reviews the history of scholarship on Isaiah 53 and presents a close reading that challenges frequent assumptions associated with the suffering servant
• Written in a clear and accesible style well suited to introducing and explaining cross disciplinary findings relevant to the study of the biblical text

 

I share parts of a fun Christmas story for kids. Mooseltoe by Margie Palatini, Henry Cole (Illustrator). Oops! I just realized I said, “Welcome to a special podcast from Targuman.COM.” This is Targuman.org, of course. Merry Christmas!

 

Andy Crouch, a savvy culture watcher and commentator who runs the Christian Vision Project at Christianity Today, has a pretty brilliant idea that’s rooted, in some ways, in Shelley’s idea of poet as unacknowledged legislator.

Speaking at the Catalyst Conference, a gathering of more than 12,000 young evangelical Christian leaders who run the gamut from very liberal to uber-conservative, outside Atlanta last weekend, Crouch urged the religiously minded among us to start thinking about culture making rather than culture battling.

It’s the theme of Crouch’s new book, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, where he traces the pattern of his community’s (i.e. evangelical Christian) engagement with culture (to use the term broadly) over the last 100 or so years.

Crouch, who for 10 years served as a campus minister at Harvard University, says Christians first engaged culture by critiquing it, sometimes viciously. Then they began copying culture, which explains the emergence of profoundly bad “Christian” pop music from the mid-’70s until the mid-’90s.

Of late, many religious folks, Crouch argues, have become blind consumers of culture. And none of these approaches — critiquing, copying or consuming — will do anything toward changing the culture for the better.

People of faith need to start earnestly cultivating culture. If you want to see something good, create it. Or support those who do.

 

This is more than just a biography of one of history’s greatest thinkers. It is also a rich cultural, religious, and intellectual history of Jews, Arabs, and Christians in the Middle Ages, as well as an accessible, if ultimately inadequate, introduction to some of Maimonides’s ideas. Mr. Kraemer’s story is populated by a large and varied cast of characters, and it ranges over a good part of the Muslim Mediterranean world. Kings, sultans, viziers, doctors, diplomats, military men, philosophers, poets, merchants, rabbis, and heretics all pass by rather quickly, and by a certain point the litany of names becomes overwhelming, even confusing. Mr. Kraemer can be a bit long-winded and repetitive; he is given to lengthy exposition, argumentation, and digression that could easily be condensed for the nonspecialist reader. More frustratingly, as expansive as Mr. Kraemer is on historical, political, and religious context — his narrative is often interrupted by biographical sketches of individuals who really have only a peripheral role to play — he is very stingy when it comes to explaining Maimonides’s ideas. He says nothing on the details of Maimonides’s ethics in his discussion of the commentary on the Mishnah and only a little bit in his chapter on the “Mishneh Torah.” His exposition of the “Guide”‘s doctrines is more generous, although it may be rough going for beginners. But then he makes no mention whatsoever of one of the work’s primary aims: showing how rational Jewish law is and how all the commandments, no matter how irrational they may seem, ultimately have their reasons.

There can be no question that Mr. Kraemer, with impeccable scholarly skill and breathtaking erudition, has written a monumental, immensely learned volume, a real labor of love (albeit one that is in serious need of a good editor). As a source for the details of Maimonides’s life and of his world, this will probably be the standard biography of Maimonides for some time to come. However, Mr. Kraemer simply does not do justice to the rich and complex thought of this intellectual titan. The philosophy of the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time deserves better than this.

My guess is that the reviewer, Steven Nadler, chair of U. of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department and author of “Sinoza[sic]: A Life,” hopes to pen that truly authoritative biography of Rambam. Until then Kramer’s book seems like it will be quite useful, at least for the undergraduate class.

 

“I put this on your kid…”

August 5th, 2008

Last week in Unshelved, a comic strip about a library, one of the librarians placed a sticker on a little girl’s back while her father’s attention was elsewhere: “I put this on your kid when you weren’t looking. What else could I have done?” [click thumbnail to view the comic]

Thus fulfilling, I’m sure, a fantasy of everybody who’s ever worked in a library, a toy store, or the children’s section of a large book store.We’ve all seen it: parents leaving young children, preschoolers sometimes, unattended while they go about their own business, sometimes in another store or business. It’s safe enough because, after all isn’t it the job of the library worker or store employee to look after the kid?

Well, no.

…What we need is for an organization such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to step up and put pressure on the corporate boards of Toys R Us, Borders and Barnes & Noble to change their “don’t risk offending parents” policy before some child is snatched from in front of the Beatrix Potter rack.

• Unshelved can be read Monday through Saturday at unshelved.com

 

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia
Philip Jenkins. HarperOne, $26.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-06-147280-0

Revisionist history is always great fun, and never more so than when it is persuasively and cogently argued. Jenkins, the Penn State history professor whose book The Next Christendom made waves several years ago, argues that it’s not exactly a new thing that Christianity is making terrific inroads in Asia and Africa. A thousand years ago, those continents were more Christian than Europe, and Asian Christianity in particular was the locus of tremendous innovations in mysticism, monasticism, theology and secular knowledge. The little-told story of Christianity’s decline in those two continents—hastened by Mongol invasions, the rise of Islam and Buddhism, and internecine quarrels—is sensitively and imaginatively rendered. Jenkins sometimes challenges the assertions of other scholars, including Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels, but provides compelling evidence for his views. The book is marvelously accessible for the lay reader and replete with fascinating details to help personalize the ambitious sweep of global history Jenkins undertakes. This is an important counterweight to previous histories that have focused almost exclusively on Christianity in the West. (Nov.)

 

I read Tolkien’s novels many times, but more as an older child (junior high school, high school, college, and so on). While they continue to captivate me they do so mostly as stories rather than as substance. The substance is there, to be sure, but not really for me.

I remember vividly reading The Great Brain by John D. Fitzgerald and my daughter loved them when she was 6-8; we read all 6 of them through 3 times in a row. I also fondly remember Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle. But I now have the stories for John’s challenge. I finally got my daughter into reading The Book of Three, the first in the five-book Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. She was hesitant (this is a 10-year old girl who has read all of the Harry Potter books at least three times each) but once she was in, she was hooked and I was reminded of why I liked the stories so much.

In particular the fourth book, Taran Wanderer, and its tale has stayed with me. Now this is a bit of a pre-review because although my daughter is done with the series and I have read parts of it to her, I have not reread TW yet. And I want to share with the impression it has left on me before I read it and find out that it was (perhaps) something very different.

The series covers Taran’s growth from a boy to a man in a span of a few years driven, of course (it is a fantasy tale of swords and sorcerers) by the need to confront and thwart evil. The tales are very similar to Welsh myth, although Alexander, I was surprised to learn last night, is from Philadelphia. In this book, the fourth, Taran seeks to determine his heritage and lineage, something that not even Dallben the sorcerer in whose custody he grows up can tell him. And so he travels throughout Prydain.

What I remember most is that spends his time going from village to village and in each learns something of each of the trades. These “Commots” as they are are called, each have a particular trade, smithing, weaving, and potting, and he seeks to learn their skills and arts. In the final book Taran becomes the new “High King” and of course what we find is that the skills he has learned are not simply something of this and that (a jack of all trades and master of none) but of friendship and leadership. By submitting himself to those masters he learned some of their art and much of their wisdom and humility. He is then a much more able leader and king as a result.

This is my recollection anyway. In some ways I think these books did indeed encourage me, along with family and friends who relished in learning new things no matter how old they were, to relish a life of “liberal arts.” One of the greatest things about my job today is that I may live vicariously through students who are far better scientists, artists, and engineers than I could ever be, but they have taught me enough that I may listen and appreciate their success and the excitement of what they are doing.

Chronicles of Prydain. Well worth the summer read. I am taking all five to the beach with us on Thursday and will report back if I find it much different than I remembered.

 

Well, it is Mac only, hence my brohter’s near miss at Macenvy. He found a free online version called Gurulib (which is currently offline, making the “free” less than useful). I was having a few issues with DL but the update tonight fixed them. Since the online version is free I may well move that direction, assuming that it comes back online and remains free. But I know there are a fair number of unwashed using Windows and therefore do not have the choice of DL so in the spirit of philadelphos I offer this information.

Build your digital Bookshelves at gurulib.com!

June 23rd, 2008
by Steve Brady

Okay, I admit it.  I was briefly tempted to get a Mac.  The Mac has this really cool software, called “Delicious Library” that takes advantage of the webcam in the computer to read ISBN codes, and build a database of your personal library.  Thankfully, that temptation is gone.

Hello, Gurulib.com!

At Gurulib you can enter books from a web interface, which moves you away from a specific OS, and allows for that whole “open community sharing” idea.  This free site not only lets you enter books into the online database by scanning the ISBN (or entering by hand, or searching on the title, or… you get the hint.)  It also allows you to share, if you wish, your library with others.  Both virtually (a “hey, check out what I like to read” sort of sharing) or literally, by allowing others to request to borrow a book, and allowing for a real exchange.  This is another great way to have some “social networks” that connects people with like interests, and enables you to share those interests.