A prayer for Donald Trump

A deep-fake image of a kneeling Donald Trump showed up in my Facebook feed recently. That image and the accompanying caption prompted this prayer: 

Dear Lord, bring this godless man to his knees, expose his lies, and prevent him from causing more harm to the United States and the world. 

Bring to their senses the so-called Evangelicals, who have turned for their deliverance to a "splintered reed of a staff, which pierces the hand of anyone who leans on it," who have abandoned the pursuit of righteousness, justice and the love of God in exchange for political power, and who have forgotten that the way of Jesus is the way of the cross. 

Lord have mercy. 

Amen. 

I touched on the reasons for my profound dismay over Evangelical Christian support for Donald Trump here. For more detail, see this excellent post by Chris Gehrz: "Is History Rhyming?" 

Helter Skelter Take 21

Hard to believe I am at the beginning of my 21st year on faculty at Briercrest College. This semester looks to be another doozy: four different courses plus a conference paper to write on a topic unrelated to anything I will be teaching this fall. And, alas, two summers on, I have not quite finished work on my response to Jason Staples's reading of Josephus. 

On the positive side, I've taught all four classes multiple times before, I'm grateful to get paid to study the Bible and to teach it to students who care about what they are learning … and I'm looking forward to a sabbatical in the winter semester. Bring it on!

Unlike two earlier beginning-of-semester posts from fifteen and sixteen years ago, the aspirational soundtrack for the semester is not U2's cover of the Beetle's song that lends this post its name, but this rather more tame ballad by Randy Stonehill: 

In other news ...

We arrived in the small college town we still call home on 14 July 2004, twenty years ago today.

Charlotte Brontë and Gabriel Wyner on Pronunciation and Efficient Language Learning

Notice the emphasis on (1) conversation, (2) memorizing texts not just isolated vocabulary, and (3) pronunciation in this passage from Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre:

Fortunately I had had the advantage of being taught French by a French lady; and as I had always made a point of conversing with Madame Pierrot, as often as I could, and had, besides, during the last seven years, learnt a portion of French by heart daily—applying myself to take pains with my accent, and imitating as closely as possible the pronunciation of my teacher—I had acquired a certain degree of readiness and correctness in the language, and was not likely to be much at a loss with Mademoiselle Adela. - Jane Eyre (Oxford World Classics), 102 

Polyglot Gabriel Wyner has “learn pronunciation first” as the first in his list of “three keys to language learning.” Why?

• “[W]hen you’re not sure about the way your language sounds, you’re stuck learning two languages instead of just one” (54).
• “If you can build a gut instinct about pronunciation, then every new word you read will automatically find its way into your ears and your mouth, and every word you hear will bolster your reading comprehension. You’ll understand more, you’ll learn faster, and you’ll spare yourself the hunt for broken words” (57)—words that we think are “pronounced one way, but [that are] actually pronounced a different way. These words can’t be shared between the written language and the spoken language, and as a result, they break up our little circle of friends” (55).
• Quotations from Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It (New York: Harmony, 2014).

Substitute your preferred dead language (Greek, Hebrew, Latin) for French, and carry on.

Reading the Bible after the Holocaust

I consumed a steady diet of (audio)-books about the Holocaust this spring, including Doris Bergen’s War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel’s powerful memoir, Night, his two holocaust novels, Dawn and Day, and, most recently, Dara Horn’s searing People Love Dead Jews. The reading (or listening in this case) began as preparation for a United States Holocaust Memorial Museum faculty seminar on “Reading the Bible after the Holocaust” in Washington, DC.

Doris Bergen’s textbook was recommended as an introduction to the Holocaust for those who needed a refresher. Turns out I did. General awareness over a lifetime can fool you into thinking you know more than you do. For me that included reading the stage version of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and watching Corrie Ten Boom in grade school, reading a selection of James Michener and Leon Uris novels in grades 8-10, a summer tour of Europe in high school that included a visit to the Dachau concentration camp, and a belated visit to Yad Vashem in 2009. But these vague impressions from decades ago did little to help me speak intelligently about the Holocaust and antisemitism to college students who, one suspects, may never have heard that six million Jews were murdered in Europe during World War II—much less that Christians had anything to do with it. Bergen’s Concise History was just what I needed, especially when paired with a tour of the Holocaust Museum’s permanent exhibit. My reaction: Everyone should read this book.

Bergen mentions Elie Wiesel, who I had, of course, heard about, but never read. So I added Night to my audio playlist. The book’s conclusion will forever be linked in my mind with a morning walk from my hotel, past the White House and the Washington Memorial, to the Holocaust Museum where the seminar was held.

The seminar had an extensive required reading list of its own on the topic of “Reading the Bible after the Holocaust.” We looked at antisemitism in biblical scholarship before the Holocaust, Jewish and Christian theological responses to the Holocaust, including sermons by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, a Warsaw Ghetto rabbi whose sermon manuscripts were discovered after the war. We also discussed post-Holocaust biblical scholarship on texts about Jews in the New Testament, and genocide in the Hebrew Bible. It was tremendously valuable to be prompted to learn about the Holocaust, and then to have the chance to reflect on it in relation to my primary fields of teaching and research (Biblical Studies, ancient Judaism) in an interdisciplinary context. The combination of well-chosen texts, skilled facilitators and a diverse group of scholars made for an exceptionally rich experience that will continue to influence my thinking and teaching in significant ways.

But I left thinking less about biblical scholarship and more about similarities between Hitler’s rise to power and the rise of authoritarian movements today, where populist leaders once again stoke fear and hatred with lies and conspiracy theories, and, sadly, gain a following among Christians more enamored by power and force than love and the way of the cross.

Study Ancient Greek in Cyprus!

I am delighted to report that Briercrest’s next intensive Greek semester will take place in the fall of 2025 on the island of Cyprus:

I had the privilege of being involved in our first three Greek semesters (2019, 2021, 2023). Although I won’t be going along to Cyprus, I can say with confidence that the learning experience will be fantastic—to say nothing of the living experience on location in the Mediterranean!

There are still a few spots open, but you will need to act soon if you want to go along. For more details, see the press release: https://www.briercrest.ca/post/trip-to-cyprus-2025

For reflections on what these first Greek semesters were like, see this post and follow the links back.

Strunk & White and the Via Negativa

17. Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. - William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (3rd ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon, 1979).

If you take William Strunk’s injunction to “Omit needless words” and perfect it, the result is the complete silence I have been practicing on this blog over the last couple months. But the end of term is upon us. Once I am done marking up my students’ needless words, perhaps I will have room to add a few of my own.  

Good Friday Snow