“That’s life for you, Rose thought. Tragedy and celebration, all mashed up next to each other like tuna salad and white bread. You needed both to make a sandwich. Thinking back on her joyful marriage to Charlie, and the devastating pain of being widowed, she figured that the sad times and the happy times were all part of the big picture. You couldn’t get through life without a hefty serving of both.”
– Rachel Ekstrom Courage, Murder by Cheesecake: A Golden Girls Cozy Mystery (Hyperion Avenue, 2025), “Out of the Freezer, Into the Frying Pan.”
- A couple of new (biblical studies) books have landed in my library. Ian Mills’ The Hypothesis of the Gospels: Narrative Traditions in Hellenistic Reading Culture and Michael Alter’s The Hypothesis of Undesigned Coincidences: A Critical Review.
- Is there a religious revival happening among Gen Zers? Not really, argues Andrew Mark Henry.
- As a blossoming cat lover, I enjoyed this piece by Joshua Schwartz on cats in and around ancient Israel. We have an orange semi-feral cat we feed regularly (along with his half-siblings and a few others) and I’ve fallen in love with him. We’ve tamed him enough that he can come indoors for a little while and loves to have his belly rubbed. I used to loathe cats but I suppose, now that I’m middle-aged, I’m starting to mellow out.
- If you’re looking for some free reading material, Rafael Rodriguez’s The First Christian Letters: Reading First and Second Thessalonians can be downloaded from Wipf and Stock. But act soon because it won’t be available for very long. (HT: Charles Savelle.)
- Megan Lewis interviewed Paula Fredriksen on diversity in early Christianity. Some of you may know that Fredriksen is probably my favorite scholar of ancient Christianity.
- ICYMI, I went on the YouTube channel What Your Pastor Didn’t Tell You to discuss undesigned coincidences (for better or for worse). Check it out!
- Robyn Faith Walsh talks about Q, the source posited as the solution to the double tradition (i.e., material found only in Matthew and Luke but not Mark).
- My parents got me this tracker for my birthday. So far in 2026, I’ve finished 3 books! Just 49 to go and I’ll have hit my goal. I’ll try to update this regularly.
The Amateur Exegete 
Thanks for the new roundup. (If I had a book counter, it would probably remain in the single digits for most of the years, given my tendency to try to juggle multiple books at once.)
Interesting stuff on cats in ancient Israel: Discussions on animals in any part of the ancient world are really interesting to me both as someone who generally likes animals (grew up in a house with multiple dogs and cats) and wants to know how far back domestication of the different species goes.
Also, is it just me or does Dr. Walsh like medusa-related artwork? (She’s got that one snake headed bust in the background in a few videos and in the one above she’s got a figure that kind of looks like a gorgon.)
Maybe I should look for some Greek mythology figures to add to that random collection left over from my childhood… (I grew up in the late 90s and early 00s, so 3/4 of it is probably Star Wars and Bionicle stuff. A few stormtroopers are missing limbs due to the covert activities of a young English Setter no doubt working for the Rebel Alliance.)
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I was an 80s and 90s kid, so my nostalgia is centered around He-Man, Ninja Turtles, and MAD Magazine.
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That’s Cool. The 80s is probably one of my favorite decades for music and film (though the 90s had some good stuff as well.)
And while I grew up after the peak of MAD Magazine, I know a few people who regularly bought issues when they were younger.
There are good pieces in the Onion and New Yorker, but some of the other satire publications just seem like they are trying to copy/compete with MAD without success. (I have checked out the Cracked website a few times, but didn’t find it to be all that it was… “cracked” up to be. I just tries to too hard to use lewd humor and shock value without having the material to work with.)
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I remember when Cracked had its own magazine, like MAD. Not as funny but still good. (I can remember picking up a copy while grocery shopping with my mom in the mid 90s. I think I got 2 or 3 after that but then went right back to MAD.)
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Based off what you said, it sounds like the print magazine version of Cracked was probably better than the later website in many ways.
I saw a few funny pieces online, but looked through one of their more recent “de-education” books and wasn’t sure what to make of it. It had the usual satirical (and very informal) tone, so maybe the “contrary to belief” facts it contained were not meant to be taken so seriously.
As an example, I think they included the claim that Machiavelli’s The Prince was a satire (which I haven’t encountered elsewhere). Then there was the section in which Ulysses S. Grant was presented as someone who was easily freaked out at the sight of blood- as opposed to the typical understanding of him as a general who shrugged off casualties in pursuit of victory.
Grant did not take the Union casualties lightly, but, at least from my reading, he didn’t display reactions out of the ordinary for a typical soldier when looking upon the wounded or dead. (Though, at a few battles, he did showed signs of withdrawal from the situation, like whitling in front of his tent at the Wilderness.) Plus, it’s difficult to imagine that if he had showed those sort of feelings, his critics wouldn’t have publicized it along with the drunkenness accusations.
So I think the accompanying image placing his head on top of a nude odalisque woman to “illustrate” was kind of over the top.
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