What is this blog?

On our honeymoon in October 2008, my husband Marc and I decided to set ourselves the task of reading the whole King James Bible over the course of 2009. We would try and read a few pages each day, needing to average 17 pages per week of Marc's 1950s Oxford University Press version to complete the task by the end of the year. And committing to maintaining a regular blog of what we read, our reactions to it and the observations of others on the subjects raised seemed a good way of trying to maintain the momentum.
I'll leave Marc to explain why he, a devout atheist raised in a vaguely Roman Catholic tradition and with a fairly trenchant dislike of religion, would want to do this. I'm a confused atheist/agnostic with a sentimental attachment to some small elements of my Anglican schooling and considerable hostility to some of the Scots Presbyterian bits of my ancestry, and I have very mixed feelings towards the project.
For me, it's partly a cultural endeavour, aimed at encountering and understanding where many of the literary references of the last several hundred years stem from.
Partly it's about trying to understand more about our major religions through one of the great books of one of them.
Partly it's about working out my own relationship with Christianity; as I mentioned, I have no affiliation to and considerable scepticism of most organised religion, be it institutional European Christianity or the Eastern faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism that so many self-deluded middle-class Westerners seem to have convinced themselves are more 'spiritual' and less patriarchal than the Religions of the Book. I have encountered plenty of smug, bigoted, homophobic, selfish, arch-capitalistic, morally bankrupt Christians who confirm all of the stereotypes and prejudices of anti-clerical socialists and anarchists. But I've also encountered some really amazing Christians, including liberation theologists in Nicaragua and Mexico who identify Jesus as a revolutionary figure whose example can stand for all those fighting oppression. And the likes of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in Hebron, whose willingess to stand in the way of the vicious oppressions of the Israeli army and the vile, murderous, racist settler community there are an inspiration to anyone with any belief in the potential for power and goodness in the human spirit.
(And yes, I know that if I'm going to hang some of my arguments on Catholic examples I should be reading the Jerusalem version, but tough, there's the literary argument mentioned above too.)

In December 2001, I spent some time in the West Bank with the International Solidarity Movement, learning for myself about the oppressions being imposed on the Palestinian people on a daily basis, and beginning a long involvement with the region. On one of the days between Christmas and New Year, we took part in a takeover of the Surda checkpoint, used by the Israeli authorities to prevent students moving between the city of Ramallah and Bir Zeit University. Many students had missed months of classes. That day, we used human chains to block the routes the Israeli army used to bring jeeps and armoured vehicles down from their military base, and held the roads while local students used heavy machinery from nearby building sites to push the concrete roadblocks and a metal military watchtower off the cliff.
We only held the roads for a few hours, after the IDF used tear gas and sound grenades to push us back. But one of my abiding memories was watching a Catholic priest in his 70s, I think called Peter and I think a member of a Michigan Peace Team, lying in the road in a huge cloud of tear gas, the only thing blocking the way of the menacing army jeep whose raucous siren was blaring for him to move. Peter had been a consistently positive and wise figure over the previous two weeks of digging out muddy roadblocks in the pissing rain, having live ammunition shot over our heads outside President Arafat's compound, and trying to balance out the pain, fear, rage, confusion and anger of 60 people who knew they wanted to do something but weren't sure what or how. Peter is a reminder for me in my most anti-clerical moments that people have done some appalling things in the name of Christianity, but there are also some wonderful people who derive strength and inspitation from the teachings of the Christian faith, and that for that maybe some of its teachings are worthy of consideration and respect.