The Book of Job

THE BOOK OF JOB

Job and His Wife, Georges de la Tour

Discussion Questions:

1. What is the basic problem explored in Job? Do we get an answer? Are we satisfied with it?

2. What did you think of the prologue in which Satan gets permission to severely test Job? Does this really happen or is it simply a literary device? Is it a parable?

3. Why is God so hard on Job's three friends? What was their basic argument to Job? What's the problem with it? Why isn't Elihu included in the rebuke? What is the proper response to another's suffering?

4. Most of us blame God when things go badly in our lives; is this justified? Is there a difference between discipline and punishment? Was Job being disciplined or punished? Are there different causes of and types of suffering?

5. Job lived before the time of Christ. Is his suffering a type of Christ's own suffering? How does Job's suffering differ from ours? Are his problems relevant to us? Are we better off than he was? Did you notice some verses where he cries out for a redeemer or mediator between him and God? (Job 9:32-35, 14:16-17, 19:25-27, 23:1-7, 33:23-25)

6. What about Job's wife?

7. Is it ok to get angry at God? Was Job self-righteous or in the right? If he was in error, what was his error? Should we ever question God? Think about Abraham, Moses, David. Have you ever noticed what great arguers and debaters the Jews are?

8. The Book of Job is an interesting example of dramatic irony in literature. The reader knows all along why these things are happening to Job yet is forced to listen to his friends' fruitless arguments. Then God speaks and it seems like the tables are turned even on the reader. At the end of it all, do we really know what God has been up to?

9. Does Job's restoration satisfy us? Was he satisfied? How about his wife?

Thank you to Nancy for these questions!

Vicki has one, too:

Did anyone notice a similarity between Job and Odysseus? It seems as if God treats Job very much the same way as the gods do Odysseus. The Book of Job is very early on in the process of Revelation. Is it unremarkable, then, that both stories should have a similar understanding of the relationship between God and man? In understanding this relationship, which parts come naturally, and which thru Revelation? How do the two stories differ?

Further Reading:

The Only Problem - Muriel Spark

The Seven Year Plan - 4

The Way to Write History - Lucian

Of Adversity - Francis Bacon

Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare

The Seven Year Plan - 3

On Love - Francis Bacon

The Doctor in Spite of Himself - Moliere

The Prime of Life

THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE

Muriel Spark

Discussion questions:
1. "By reducing Miss Brodie to nothing more than a collection of maxims, Spark forces us to become Brodie's pupils. In the course of the novel we never leave the school to go home, alone, with Miss Brodie. We surmise that there is something unfulfilled and even desperate about her, but the novelist refuses us access to her interior. Brodie talks a great deal about her prime, but we don't witness it, and the nasty suspicion arises that perhaps to talk so much about one's prime is by definition to be in it no longer." - James Wood

Do Miss Brodie's progressive principles and method reflect a realistic vision for her girls and their futures, or is the education she gives them mostly self-justification? Does she really want them to achieve great things and thereby, perhaps, miss out on the more common-place happiness of family life?

2. Why is Miss Brodie's love-life thwarted? Recalling Miss Brodie's story of her ancestor, Willie Brodie, does Miss Brodie die cheerfully on a gibbet of her own devising?

3. "Her disapproval of the Church of Rome was based on her assertions that it was a church of superstition, and that only people who did not want to think for themselves were Roman Catholics. In some ways, her attitude was a strange one, because she was by temperament suited only to the Roman Catholic Church; possibly it could have embraced, even while it disciplined, her soaring and diving spirit, it might even have normalised her." Does this comment reflect Spark's own decision to become a Catholic?

4. Why does Sandy "betray" Miss Brodie? "If you did not betray us it is impossible that you could have been betrayed by us. The word betrayal does not apply ..."

5. Sandy says, "She thinks she is Providence ... she thinks she is the God of Calvin, she sees the beginning and the end". Does Miss Brodie assume godlike prerogatives?

6. Why is Sandy always described as having small eyes?

7. Is the author's terse style off-putting?

Of Interest:

- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969, starring Maggie Smith (pictured above)

The Seven Year Plan - 2

On Old Age - Cicero

Fingerprints & The Empty Column - Tobias Dantzig (Number; the Language of Science)

The Odyssey - Homer

Apology - Plato

The Will to Believe - William James

Of Idleness - Montaigne

Of Friendship - Francis Bacon

The Seven-Year Plan

Dr. Jason Jewell, head of the Dept. of Humanities at Faulkner University, has resolved to read the Great Books of the Western World series in seven years. Read about it on his blog.
He is posting weekly reviews and links to all the reading material.

So far I've read:

The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent - John Erskine

The Two Drovers - Sir Walter Scott

The Three Hermits - Leo Tolstoy

Of the Study of History - David Hume

Of Truth - Francis Bacon

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg - Mark Twain

The English Bill of Rights - 1689

The March to the Sea (Book IV of The Persian Expedition) - Xenophon

My First Play - Charles Lamb

On Friendship - Cicero

The Enchiridion - Epictetus

The Killers - Ernest Hemingway

New Names For Old - Edward Kasner & James R. Newman

The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola - Tacitus

On Being the Right Size - J.B.S. Haldane

The Lantern-bearers - Robert Louis Stevenson

The Eruption of Vesuvius - Pliny the Younger

Beyond the Google - Edward Kasner & James R. Newman

Contentment - Plutarch (chapter 4 of 'Moralia')

A Call to Patriots - Thomas Paine

A Classical Education

A Traveller's Tale; On Patrick Leigh Fermor

Discussion Questions:

1. The Duchess and PLF have maintained a lively correspondence for over 50 years. Is such a thing possible nowadays? Does email suffice? What of the charming incidentals of letter-writing: PLF's hand-drawn illustrations, the sensory experience of reading pen on paper, the pleasure of filing letters away in a special box?

2. Our warrior-poets, where are they?

3. The classical education which both correspondents received (although the Duchess's was of a more feminine type) creates a cultural and literary bond between them and the many other characters who come into their lives. What do we have to replace this, if anything?

4. What part does a classical education play in character development? How did they survive the ordeals which life had in store for them (WW2, financial struggles, family issues, hard work, loss) without resorting to psychiatrists and pharmaceuticals?

5. Self-esteem; is it overrated? Both correspondents have a lively sense of humour and playfulness and, yet, they are both able to express deep emotion without sentimentality. How does a classical education help achieve such balance?

6. Is any one else charmed by the idea of the Duchess spending her days in chicken coops & vegetable gardens, in stout tweeds, and her evenings glamorously dressed to entertain the nobility of England?

2011 Reading List

• A Traveler's Tale; On Patrick Leigh Fermor
• Selections from "The Essays, Articles & Reviews of Evelyn Waugh", ed. by Donat Gallagher
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
• The Book of Job
• The Violins of Saint-Jacques - Patrick Leigh Fermor
• The Haunted Bookshop - Christopher Morley
• My Life in France - Julia Child
• Diary of a Madman - Lu Xun
• Lilies of the Field - William Barrett
• The Closing of the Muslim Mind - Robert Reilly
• I Drink, Therefore I Am - Roger Scruton