Faith & Fun
Some things I’ve taken off of my sidebar, but stil want to keep around somewhere. Also, a spot for some of my personal religious stuff.
BIBLES I LIKE:
This is my favoritest Bible—the one Jeff and Jack recommended. It’s a yummy Protestant version. Awesome, awesome footnotes—but if you had wanted to read the Book of Tobit, you won’t be happy with it. (I used quotes from the Book of Tobit at my wedding, partly because I liked them the most out of the suggested scriptures, and partly to amuse my best friend, the Christian-history professor, who at the time had a cat named Tobit.)
I also adore the Saint Joseph Edition of the New American Bible, which contains all the Catholic books and uses clear, lovely language. It’s very accurate, and is likewise beautifully annotated. (I did notice that linguistic precision is placed ahead of taking sides on the few remaining Catholic-Protestant divisions of creed in the footnotes.)
I love the King James version of the Bible, and it is the only choice for English majors or social historians—anyone who need to read the version of scripture that has been alluded to in other works for the past several centuries. (It’s also available in both Catholic and Protestant versions, for extra happenin’-ness.) However, to get at the original meanings one essentially has to translate a translation—and, like copying a copy, it’s a perilous process. So it’s way poetic, but a bit more work and there is an element of risk that one might misunderstand a phrase here and there so I’m not into it for home Bible study.
What most Bible-reading programs don’t take into account is this fact, which everyone knows but no one admits out loud: it’s okay to skim through Leviticus, and there are parts of the Torah—and the rest of the Old Testament, for that matter—that require a line-by-line read that you would be doing right now if you weren’t spending too much time on Leviticus. Likewise, after the first time through it’s cool to skim the Book of Revelation so you can spend more time in the gospels or the epistles.
One isn’t supposed to say it—but there it is. So sue me.