Marc Zvi Brettler, Petter Enns, Daniel J. Harrington, editors. The Bible and the Believer: How to Read the Bible Critically and Religiously. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

The Bible and the Believer looks like a great book for thinking about how one can study biblical texts using academic methods but also still find those same texts meaningful in a faith-based religious context. Brettler, Enns, and Harrington offer their personal perspectives as a Jew, Protestant, and Catholic – and each one responds to the others’ perspectives. I thought it would be a great book for anyone struggling to make sense of the differences between scholarly study and more conventional religious reading of the Hebrew Bible. For some people, studying the Hebrew Bible academically can make returning to their religious readings difficult, but these scholars show how the two are compatible for them.

While I was checking out The Bible and the Believer, I was also really excited to find Text, Image, and Otherness in Children’s Bibles: What is in the Picture?, edited by Caroline Vander Stichele and Hugh S. Pyper.   There are chapters on “Otherness, Ideology, and Illustration of Daniel 6,” South African children’s Bibles, and the flood. I’m interested in visual culture, especially in how images are interpretations of verbal text and can lead us to read verbal text differently. I have read some other articles on the history of printing bibles with images, but this is a great addition to those ideas.