Kathleen M. O'connor - Böcker

This book shares the results of a symposium held to honor the work of Walter Brueggemann and Charles Cousar at Columbia Theological Seminary on the occasion of their retirement. Each author and each chapter of the book simultaneously engages the Bible, the church and the world--a three-part engagement that was fundamental to the acclaimed careers of Brueggemann and Cousar.

How can it be that good people suffer and yet God is just? For thousands of years, the profoundly moving story of Job has allowed people of faith to reflect on that question.Among the books of the Old Testament classified as “wisdom” literature, the book of Job never loses its freshness and power. Job is a righteous man, stripped of all he holds dear, who engages in a powerful dialogue with three friends on the nature and cause of suffering. Job’s friends struggle to justify Job’s suffering and advise him on a course of action. Job counters their arguments and then turns his attention to God in a desperate plea for justice. When God’s answer comes from the whirlwind it is not what we expect.In this commentary, Kathleen O’Connor makes the characters in the book of Job and their speeches come alive. She explores and illuminates the beliefs that undergird their perspectives, helping the reader contextualize this powerful tale. Then, O’Connor invites readers to engage with Job’s story personally and work to develop their own solution to the dilemmas faced by both Job and his friends. It is a unique approach that connects both head and heart with this powerful inquiry into suffering and God’s justice.

This volume presents the spiritualties, implicit or explicit, of the wisdom books of the Old Testament. An additional goal is to explore the vast and frequently overlooked resource that wisdom literature provides for contemporary believers.

Troubling Jeremiah presents essays by Jeremiah scholars who are troubled by the biblical book and give the scholarship on Jeremiah trouble in turn. Essays seek to move beyond the Duhm-Mowinckel source criticism of the book to address matters of metaphor, final form, intertextuality, and the relationship of the book to various audiences of readers. Taken together, the 24 essays in this volume press for an end to 'innocent' readings of Jeremiah inasmuch as current models prove inadequate for troubling the very Jeremiah they have already helped to reveal.