- “Genesis starts with ‘In the beginning’; and that is always a great place to start.”
- “The Bible’s stories, laws, and beliefs decisively influenced the western imagination; biblical heroes became models for kings and commoners, and taught westerners how to act, what to pursue, how to govern and rule.”
- “The Bible has been many a person’s favorite book—the text one might bring along to a solitary island, or if one wanted something to read in jail.”
- “We are still coming to terms with this dwarfing of a text that, until not too long ago, was a towering monument of the ancient world; so towering, in fact, that it was believed to reach all the way to heaven.”
- “What does God do on the seventh day? He rests. Good for Him.”
- “It’s like the story of Pandora’s Box. If you put women in the mix everything goes wrong: labor, childbirth, gender relations, and so on. Everything goes wrong.”
As recorded by Core office employee Winona Hudak during Prof. Michael Zank‘s introduction to the book of Genesis this morning in CC101.
One Comment
Ben Grinberg posted on September 14, 2011 at 8:06 pm
“Zank is an expert in German Jewish intellectual history. He has translated and edited writings by political philosopher Leo Strauss and written on the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen. He has also worked on Martin Buber’s contribution to the study of religion and contributed to the study of Franz Rosenzweig. ”
http://www.bu.edu/religion/faculty/bios/zank/
Kind of like the life I had someday wanted to lead.
…Ah! The foliage of Bay State. The cool Boston breeze wafting from the nearby harbor to this quaint corner of the city. The rustle of leaves and smell of the Fall fills my brownstone as I ponder over Buber and tea.