Some evangelicals clamor for more teaching about the Bible at secular institutions, but they don’t understand how badly many star professors twist it. The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Companion, 23 essays edited by John Barton (Princeton, 2016), has some useful material but also provides evidence of the problem.

Here’s one example I’ll get into by asking you a question: Who’s the heroine of the book of Ruth? If you answer either Ruth or Naomi, you’re wrong, according to Professor Emerita Laura Donaldson of Cornell’s Religious Studies Program. The correct answer is … Ruth’s sister-in-law Orpah, purportedly a role model for aboriginal peoples because she refuses to abandon her ancestral traditions and worship God rather than the Moabite god Chemosh.

As Eryl Davies, head of Bangor University’s School of Philosophy and Religion, enthusiastically summarizes Donaldson’s work, Ruth is in error because she joins “the very nation that had been instructed to destroy the religious heritage of her own people. … As if to emphasize the betrayal of her indigenous heritage, she is characterized as ‘Ruth the Moabite’ several times in the story. … Donaldson’s postcolonial reading of the story enables us to appreciate the narrative in a fresh light.”

Davies, following today’s academic tendencies, suggests that the love Ruth has for Naomi could be a lesbian attachment: Some professors, “conceding that the threshing floor scene between Ruth and Boaz is suggestive of sexual intimacy between them, argue that Ruth was entangled in both same-sex and opposite-sex relations, and viewed in this light, the book of Ruth is regarded as destabilizing familiar gender categories.”

The Hebrew Bible’s general view is unsurprisingly liberal, but it astoundingly includes some criticism of Marxist “liberation theology” from the left: We learn that liberation theologians who see the exodus from Egypt as a successful revolutionary struggle should emphasize what happened next: “suffering by the indigenous population of Canaan.”

Bookmarks

Julie Posselt’s Inside Graduate Admissions (Harvard, 2016) shows how admissions committees work and faculty gatekeepers think in 10 top-ranked doctoral programs. In one scene she shows the linguistics committee deciding on “Maria, a woman who had attended a small religious college”—and had scored in the 99th percentile on the verbal section of the Graduate Record Exam (the SAT equivalent for graduate admissions). One professor sneered, “Right-wing religious fundamentalists.” The admissions committee chair said, “I would like to beat that college out of her.” The department chair asked, to laughter from most of the professors, “You don’t think she’s a nutcase?” Maria did not gain admission.

Bill Bennett’s Tried by Fire: The Story of Christianity’s First Thousand Years (Thomas Nelson, 2016) presents readable stories of missionaries, martyrs, and theological disputes. Biblical Worldview by Mark Ward and others (BJU Press, 2016) is a good textbook for 11th- and 12th-graders. Christian Bioethics by Ben Mitchell and Joy Riley (B&H, 2014) is a fine introduction to key issues including abortion, euthanasia, infertility and assisted reproductive technologies, and organ donation. The war against Darwin dissenters continues, as Jerry Bergman documents in Silencing the Darwin Skeptics (Leafcutter, 2016).

In Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), Sam Quinones shows how some football players pushed too hard to achieve become addicted to pain pills or the cheap heroin alternative, but I also wonder what happens when parents and teachers don’t push kids to achieve: People gain appropriate self-esteem through accomplishment, and those who haven’t earned success often have deep feelings of unworthiness that drive them to drugs.

Quinones also shows how pain researchers sought a “Holy Grail,” a drug that would fight intense pain without producing addictive euphoria followed by crashing. Quinones calls that a part of “the oft-repeated story, as humankind sought heaven without hell,” and notes that researchers are now saying, “the chances of finding the Holy Grail drug are slim to none.” —M.O.