psychology dector

The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary By Robert Alter W.W. Norton & Company, Inc ., $35.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0-393-06812-2 The importance of sacred texts forms the foundation of culture. The preserved wisdom inherent in such works as the Koran , the Bhagavad-Gita , and the Bible teaches us how to live and the significance of our life experiences. Through sacred literature, we discover our place in the universe and the meaning of life. It is in that spirit that Robert Alter’s new translation with commentary, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes , re-evaluates the wisdom contained in those biblical books for a twenty-first century audience. Alter focuses on a more literal translation using Hebraic sources, and compares the language to the Vulgate , Septuagint, Egyptian, Arabic and rabbinic Hebrew sources. He takes great pains to construct his reordering of the words, utilizing a linguistically dogmatic and accurate translation...

It is not often that you see teenagers stay at school late into the evening to hear a guest speaker discuss character, values, and history. But the students at Saint Genevieve High School are not your average teenagers. It is not often that you see an 86 year old former president take time out from his busy book tour to meet with 600 students and more than 400 invited guests in a high school gymnasium. But then former President Jimmy Carter is not your average man. How did Carter, president more than thirty years ago, develop such a close relationship with a small Catholic high school in the San Fernando Valley? The answer to that question involves some history and a remarkable story. St. Gen’s principal, Dan Horn , struck up a friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Carter in 1986 when he was a public school teacher in Virginia. They have kept in touch all these years, and when Horn took over St. Gen’s a decade ago, he renewed his contacts in Georgia and made several trips with students to Car...

Sometimes we wake in the middle of a dark night to the sound of voices. Someone is calling our name. On occasion, I have had this happen to me in my waking life. Walking down a hospital corridor once after visiting a sick family member, I heard a voice clearly call out to me. I turned sharply, and went back to the room I had just passed. An old man wearing a black beret sat up in the hospital bed. He stared at me, and I stared back, waiting. He was as confused as I was, and I realized the voice was not his. I walked up and down the hallway, but the voice did not call my name again. I went to a party once shortly after I got married. People gathered in groups in the various rooms, speaking of things, sharing stories and small talk. I gravitated to the den where I encountered a middle-aged woman surrounded by a number of people. She was a guest of the couple throwing the party, but I did not know her, and had not been introduced. “So what you are telling me, Doreen, is that you can predi...

Someone I met once who spends his days designing complex computer programs argued with me that when we die, it is as if someone turned the power off on the human machine. Click, and that’s all, folks. I leaped into the fight with my Catholic sensibility. “What about the soul?” I insisted. He assured me that the soul was a story we told ourselves in the hope that we can pull off the ultimate cheat: survive death. But once the plug was pulled, he said, we are gone. My life teaches me that there are, in the end, many things we haven’t a prayer of ever understanding. There is fate and there is destiny; don’t forget luck and intuition and falling in love for a far from complete set of life’s intangibles. These are the mysteries of us. So, I’m not overburdening the list of life’s unexplainable dimensions when I make the following statement: I believe in ghosts and things that live in the space just north of reality, and I have proof of their existence because I have lived with them. Cathy is...

Gift From The Sea: The 50th Anniversary Edition By Anne Morrow Lindbergh Pantheon, $16.00 cloth ISBN: 978-0679406839 “For whatever we lose (like a you or a me) it’s always ourselves we find in the sea.” E.E. Cummings  In these difficult times, it is hard to fathom the curves of our lives. So it is with that spirit that I picked up Anne Morrow Lindbergh ’s 1955 classic, Gift From The Sea . I have taught Lindbergh’s work in the past, and I knew her history. Her father was a lawyer, a United States ambassador and a senator. Her mother was president of Smith College. Her childhood was one of learning and privilege, and her life long habits of reading and writing carried her through to adulthood, where she married aviator Charles Lindbergh and learned to fly herself. Of course, history records her most famous challenge, the kidnapping and murder of her firstborn child , Charles Augustus Lindbergh III on March 1, 1932. The kidnapper, Bruno Richard Hauptmann was later tried and executed,...

Our president has failed us. He has lined his cabinet with former Wall Street fat cats, or those who have taken handouts from them. These are the same people who sold America bad mortgages and then bet on our failure to pay back the loans. Yes, they collected both ways, and Barack Obama is in bed with them. Now he has his top aides out there hitting the morning news programs and cable news outlets instilling fear in Americans that a foreclosure moratorium will hurt our fragile economy. But bailing out the banks to the tune of billions of dollars, not so much! Worse, those billionaire banks sat on the TARP funds to enrich their own pockets and not help struggling Americans to modify their home loans as they were required to do. Now, when he should be penalizing the banks for their bad behavior, he conveniently looks the other way and says it will be disastrous for the economy. On education, Obama and Arne Duncan have chosen to reinforce many provisions of George W. Bush’s No Child Le...

What I hear from students every day is that they cannot keep up with the reading in college courses. The problem seems worse for non-English majors. At least English majors have a history of reading to draw upon when facing assignments. The common problem among all students, though, is the amount of reading versus time. How does one keep up with the demands of reading in college? The need to consume and digest information is the heart and soul of college course work. The trick is to dive into the work and hopefully, like working out a muscle, the ability to read and understand information will become a stronger skill the more one practices. One must realize that not all reading is created or assigned equally. We read for different purposes, depending on the subject and need. Reading for English class is different from any other reading one does. When reading history or science, information and facts are most important. It might be possible to skim through the chapters, capturing the pe...

We stood in the shadows watching the blue light from the helicopter illuminate the neighbor’s house. A police car blocked the street and dark figures moved in and out of the shadows cast by the streetlight. A uniformed policeman came out of a nearby backyard, went to the trunk of the car and removed what looked like an assault rifle. My neighbor, John, my wife, and I stepped back into the dark against a garage door and waited for what would happen next. Without warning, a police officer stood up from the grass less than twenty feet away from us, racked a round into the chamber of his pump-action shotgun and prepared to fire at the illuminated house. Two other officers came barreling around the corner, running for the protection of the police car, screaming at us to run. They kept saying over and over as they took cover that we needed to leave the area immediately because our lives were in danger. I am a night owl, one of those people who, given his preference, could stay up all night a...

Hitch 22: A Memoir By Christopher Hitchens Twelve/Hachette Book Group, Inc., $26.99 cloth ISBN: 978-0-446-54033-9 Arguably, one of the most famous pens in the magazine Vanity Fair each month belongs to Christopher Hitchens , and in his recent memoir, Hitch 22 , we clearly hear the magazine’s recognizable style, a gossipy, conversational tone as if one is sitting in front of a roaring fire listening to a raconteur regale the assembled group with what’s really happening in the world. His writing is both intimate and worldly, accessible and sophisticated. Hitchens, the transplanted Englishman, never disappoints the reader looking for strong opinions, juicy details, and wit in abundance. The memoir follows chronologically, beginning with a discussion of Hitchens’ parents, whom he calls Yvonne and the Commander. A divorce leads to his mother’s murder by her suicidal new paramour, leaving Christopher with many loose ends in the relationship. Hitchens struggles to come to terms with her dea...