/lit/ - Literature

some of the yale ocw lectures

textbooks ... it should be easy to find one. in fact, one of those lectures uses a book titled something like 'A Historical Introduction to the New Testament', which summarizes every book AND provides a lot of scholarly historical/literary background.

There are probably a lot of things like that for OT ... actually, I'd be interested in recommendations.

There are also annotated editions, with lengthy endnotes/summaries/critical-introductions. I have one of these, I can read the summary or delve into the actual book if I want. Since it's really old, foreign literature, you really need those sort of summaries to find out wtf it's supposed to be talking about, AFAIC. Pic related.

>>2851023
not sure if this is the one he means, but it has great endnotes & introduction.

So /lit/, I have a religion question, which I'm posting here because 1) it's arguably a /phil/ topic, and 2) religion discussions on this board are actually sometimes productive.

So anyway, here I am reading the news, when I hit upon this little gem:

>The billionaire philanthropist Melinda Gates, a practising Catholic, has thrown down the gauntlet to the Vatican and vowed to dedicate the rest of her life to improving access to contraception across the globe.
>Melinda Gates, a practising Catholic
>practicing Catholic
source: guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/11/melinda-gates-challenges-vatican-contraception

Now here I was, thinking that the question of whether you're still a Catholic despite doing un-Catholic things for which you're neither sorry nor repentent, was settled long ago—either that, or I missed the part about how Martin Luther and King Henry VIII both lived their entire lives as practicing Catholics. But apparently I was wrong: you can believe\do fuck-all, and you're still a Catholic. Neat! This means that I'm a Catholic. This means that we're all Catholics!

Now, I understand that Gates considers herself a Catholic. But the fact that she has her own version of it, where she believes the pope is just wrong, means that as a matter of strict factual accuracy (like from the perspective of whether the news article is correct), she is not a Catholic.

the introduction to my edition (pic related) offers an overview of that, including the history specifically of the KJV (obviously), but also events preceding that

going to read this
which books are must-reads
which are meh

cool story bro