Scholars Douglas Knight and Amy-Jill Levine guide readers in how to ask the right questions of the Hebrew Bible
February 16, 2012 For Douglas A. Knight and Amy-Jill Levine, Vanderbilt University professors who have collaborated on a new book called The Meaning of the Bible, “the Bible is not a book of answers. It may be, however, a book that helps its readers ask the right questions, and then provides materials that can spark diverse answers.”
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Marvin Bell talks with Chapter 16 about what makes poetry different from prose
February 15, 2012 Marvin Bell has written twenty-three books of poems and taught for more than forty years at The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but he is hardly slowing down. In 2011 alone, he published a new book of poems (Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems), a children’s book (A Primer about the Flag), and a collaboration with the photographer Nathan Lyons (Whiteout). He also frequently performs his poems with musicians, including jazz bassist Glen Moore and his own son, the Tennessee-based singer/songwriter Nathan Bell. Marvin Bell will read from his work on February 20 at 4:30 p.m. in the Tom Jackson Building on the campus of Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro. The event is free and open to the public.
Read moreFor Tina LoTufo, a trip to the bookshelf is a way of rereading her own love story
February 14, 2012 I am the lone reader in a house full of philistines. My youngest child will still pick up the occasional book, but at sixteen she has so many other interests that each year reading seems to fall lower down her list of priorities. Not me. I don’t have a list of priorities. There is only reading.
Read moreIn an essay for The Guardian, Linda Leaming tells her own story
February 14, 2012 When Linda Leaming went to Bhutan for the first time in 1994, she fell in love with the land and the people. And reader, she married one of them. The Nashville-based author of Married to Bhutan tells their story in the Guardian, here.
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In Dewey Lambdin’s latest installment of the Alan Lewrie series, it’s 1805, and Captain Lewrie prowls the coastline of the American Southeast in search of French and Spanish privateers
February 13, 2012 In Reefs and Shoals, Dewey Lambdin’s eighteenth Alan Lewrie adventure, Great Britain is at war again with France and Spain. With privateers attacking British shipping in the Caribbean and Florida Straits, the Admiralty orders Captain Lewrie to take his frigate southwest, via Bermuda, to the Bahamas. Once there he is to assemble a squadron and put a stop to the depredations, whatever it takes. In telling his tale, Lambdin recreates the context, the technology, and the swashbucklers of that time and place.
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John Kaltner’s focused analysis of Islam’s sacred text offers insight and corrects misunderstandings
February 10, 2011 According to John Kaltner, most Americans have no idea what’s in the Qur’an, Islam’s sacred text. That doesn’t stop many of them from having an opinion, however. The Muslim faith is regularly denigrated as inherently sexist, violent, and inflexible. In an effort to correct such misunderstandings, Kaltner, a professor of Muslim-Christian relations at Rhodes College in Memphis, has written Introducing the Qur’an for Today’s Reader, a critical reading of the Qur’an that focuses on some of the text’s more controversial themes.
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