The Bible | ZETEO

Bob Dylan. Photograph: Jan Persson/Redferns - cropped for Zeteo cover, full image inside

As Dylan Went Out One Morning

December 11, 2017 by William Eaton

By Oriana Schällibaum and Marcel Grissmer As I went out one morning may strike the casual listener as one of the more insipid songs Bob Dylan ever wrote. Recorded for the 1967 John Wesley Harding album it has never been very important to Dylan; he recorded the song in only five takes and, to date, has performed it in concert only once (in 1974).[1] Yet, “As I went out one morning”—apart from being a joy to listen to—is worth a […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, celebrity, literary theory, popular music, The Bible

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Dylan: “Gotta Serve Somebody”

November 28, 2016 by William Eaton

You may be an ambassador to England or FranceYou may like to gamble, you might like to danceYou may be the heavyweight champion of the worldYou may be a socialite with a long string of pearls But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeedYou’re gonna have to serve somebodyWell, it may be the devil or it may be the LordBut you’re gonna have to serve somebody — Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody,” 1979 Bob Dylan, who first achieved […]

Categories: ZiLL • Tags: Bob Dylan, Christianity, Jesus, popular music, The Bible

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Sacrificio di Isacco (The Sacrifice of Isaac), 1603. In the collection of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Genesis Interpretation After Auerbach

June 28, 2016 by Martin Green

Twenty-Three Ways (and Counting) of Looking at the Bible By Martin Green Review of Reading Genesis: Beginnings, edited by Beth Kissileff (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2016) Beth Kissileff’s recent anthology Reading Genesis: Beginnings presents twenty-three ways of looking at the first book of the Hebrew Bible. Well, perhaps not twenty-three distinct ways of reading Scripture, but twenty-three authors weigh in, applying tools, many from secular disciplines, to find new meanings in these ancient texts. And these approaches, including game theory, leadership […]

Categories: Review • Tags: Genesis, literary theory, religion, social science, The Bible

Bible / Translation / Kushner / Genesis

October 29, 2015 by Walter Cummins

Biblical Uncertainties I came to Aviya Kushner’s The Grammar of God well prepared, having, a month before the book was published, heard her talk about her arduous ten-year writing process. When I first learned of her topic, Biblical translation, I expected a discussion of the typical complexities of rendering a work in a language other than its original. But she began her talk with a riveting revelation. Kushner, having grown up in a Hebrew-speaking home in an Orthodox community […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: Aviya Kushner, Genesis, The Bible, translation, war

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Factual Mind-Sets, Communing Sensibilities

April 26, 2015 by Ed Mooney

As someone who writes quite a bit about religion from philosophical and literary — not to say, religious — points of view, I was not surprised but piqued by a Sunday opinion piece in the New York Times. Here is T. M. Luhrmann, a Stanford anthropologist who writes regularly for the Times on religion. Here she reports on “Faith vs. Facts.” A broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental […]

Categories: Ed Mooney, ZiR • Tags: religion, science, The Bible, thinking, Thoreau

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Photo by Lloyd Mulvey shows actors Gibson Frazier (playing Anton) and Zoe Winters (playing Alina) in the Pearl Theatre’s staged reading of Oded Gross’s The Government Inspector, January 2015; directed by Lucie Tiberghien.

“We’re merely pawns in a corrupt system”

February 5, 2015 by William Eaton

The comedian, actor, songwriter, and playwright Oded Gross has done a marvelous (to include quite funny) job of updating Gogol’s classic satire of bad government: The Government Inspector. I will get right to the new text, near the beginning, when the officials of a small town realize that a government inspector is coming. ARTEMIS (The Director of Health): What does he want to inspect us for? ANTON (The Mayor): He’s traveling here to deem whether or not there’s any unnecessary […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiLL • Tags: corruption, Gogol, government, politics, The Bible, theater