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"I have never before written about Glenn Beck, [who] I think of as a hugely skilled political entertainer who ... has made his rise on skillfully inflammatory rhetoric that has hooked the emotions of millions. But this time he hooked the Bible and the God of the Bible.... "He has united and offended all Christians who know that our God is a God of justice, and that advancing justice is central to our mission as a people and to the kingdom of God for which we work and wait."

Translating biblical criticism from seminary to laypeople in the pews

>THE DIVINE COMMANDS to commit genocide found in the Old Testament are some of the most difficult and disturbing parts of scripture. Consider God's decree against the Amalekites: "Totally destroy everything ... Do not spare them; put to death ... children and infants" (1 Samuel 15:2-3). Such passages have been used repeatedly to justify bloodshed in the name of God, beginning with the Crusades and continuing right up through U.S. history, where texts were used in sermons to justify the slaughter of American Indians.... I'd like to propose that there is a better way-a way found in learning to read our Bibles as the apostle Paul read his. >Paul has removed the references to violence against Gentiles, and recontextualized these passages to instead declare God's mercy in Christ for Gentiles. This constitutes a major redefinition of how salvation is conceived: Instead of salvation meaning God "delivering" the ancient Israelites from the hands of their enemies through military victory (as described in Psalm 18, above), Paul now understands salvation to mean the restoration of all people in Christ, including those same "enemy" Gentiles.

Marilynne Robinson, on how biblical narratives influenced realist fictions' honoring of "common" human experiences (consciously or unconsciously)

'Last December in these pages, the editor and critic Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today's mainstream literary novelists. (Whither the Flannery O'Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can't do this all by herself!) But there doesn't seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers. On the contrary, a surprising number can't seem to avoid engaging with faith, even when they pickle their protagonists. If today's literary fiction can't be accurately described as "post-Jewish" the way Elie calls it "post-Christian," that may be because in Judaism, faith itself is largely built on the concept of preserving memory. And the urge to stop time - to freeze the fleeting moment and thaw out its meaning later - is what drives many writers to write.... 'Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them, by understanding the present through the lens of the past.... The belief that we are just re-enacting history persists into the modern era, even among the nonreligious. To give only one example, last fall the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, as "a modern-day Haman," a biblical Persian official who plotted a genocide against the Jews. ' This seeking out of patterns straddles the line between fantasy and our desire for real transcendence. It is the very stuff of literature. As Yerushalmi describes it, "What was suddenly drawn up from the past was not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn." '...That existential possibility makes Judaism into a religion unusually friendly to writers. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record-­keepers, forever s

'Last December in these pages, the editor and critic Paul Elie wrote a much discussed essay about the relative absence of Christian belief as a theme among today's mainstream literary novelists. (Whither the Flannery O'Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can't do this all by herself!) But there doesn't seem to be any corresponding dry spell among contemporary Jewish fiction writers. On the contrary, a surprising number can't seem to avoid engaging with faith, even when they pickle their protagonists. If today's literary fiction can't be accurately described as "post-Jewish" the way Elie calls it "post-Christian," that may be because in Judaism, faith itself is largely built on the concept of preserving memory. And the urge to stop time - to freeze the fleeting moment and thaw out its meaning later - is what drives many writers to write.... 'Commanded by God dozens of times in the Hebrew bible to remember their past, Jews historically obeyed not by recording events but by ritually re-enacting them, by understanding the present through the lens of the past.... The belief that we are just re-enacting history persists into the modern era, even among the nonreligious. To give only one example, last fall the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, described Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then president of Iran, as "a modern-day Haman," a biblical Persian official who plotted a genocide against the Jews. ' This seeking out of patterns straddles the line between fantasy and our desire for real transcendence. It is the very stuff of literature. As Yerushalmi describes it, "What was suddenly drawn up from the past was not a series of facts to be contemplated at a distance, but a series of situations into which one could somehow be existentially drawn." '...That existential possibility makes Judaism into a religion unusually friendly to writers. Memory as an article of faith often comes naturally to writers, who by temperament are likely to be diarists and record-­keepers, forever s

"Like Lin, I'm a Harvard graduate, albeit more than a decade ahead of him, and a second-generation Chinese-American. I'm also a fellow believer, one of those every-Sunday-worshiping, try-to-read-the-Bible-and-pray types, who agreed with Lin when he said to reporters after the Jazz game, "God works in mysterious and miraculous ways." "...My gut tells me that Lin will not wind up like Tebow.... I have the sense that his is a quieter, potentially less polarizing but no less devout style of faith."

The Bible advocates for the poor & oppressed

graphic chart of different combos (jpg)

by Paul Moses - Newsday - 6/29/2001 DR. FREDERICK SMITH has the usual textbooks on ambulatory care, surgery and prescription drugs in his office. But the shelves also hold D.T.Suzuki's "Essays in Zen Buddhism," a volume of Cardinal John Henry Newman's writings, books on Confucianism and Judaism, the Quran and alarge-type, 69-year-old Bible a patient gave him, so worn that its cover has fallen off. These, too, are tools of Smith's trade. As associate chief of internal medicine at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, the gray-bearded, 56-year-old physician has found that religious faith can help his patients,and he's trying to teach that to a generation of up-and-coming doctors. His 2-year-old course, Religion and Medicine, is part of a growing move to sensitize doctors to the role faith plays in their patients' lives. It gives residents at North Shore who've completed medical school but are still receiving some training a chance to learn about their patients' religious traditions....

"Evangelical Christianity need not be defined by the simplistic theology, cultural isolationism and stubborn anti-intellectualism that most of the Republican candidates have embraced. >Like other evangelicals, we accept the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ and look to the Bible as our sacred book, though we find it hard to recognize our religious tradition in the mainstream evangelical conversation. Evangelicalism at its best seeks a biblically grounded expression of Christianity that is intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking. In contrast, fundamentalism is literalistic, overconfident and reactionary."