Robert Flanagan Reading Monday 3/26 @ 7pm

Please join us on Monday, March 26 at 7 p.m. as Delaware author Bob Flanagan reads from his new short story collection, Fight Night.

Flanagan is the author of the acclaimed Marine Corps novel Maggot and the short story collections Naked to Naked Goes and Loving Power. Born in Toledo, he studied at the University of Chicago and served as Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing program at Ohio Wesleyan University, retiring in 2010. He lives in Delaware with his wife, Katy, and works out in a basement gym featuring a heavy bag, a peanut bag (“speed bag”) and a boom-box.

Nan Byrne, a writer and producer, has high praise for Fight Night. “Like a perfect left hook hitting America’s mid-section, Flanagan’s new collection of stories packs a powerful wallop,” she said. “Inside this book you will find spit and towel tales of the bruised and battered, jammed-fingered, broken-down and bloody-nosed, but still-resilient souls who come out swinging in that “cap down and collar up” corner of the universe where glory dreams collide with the hard-knock life. From the salty reminisces of a worn-out prize fighter to the liquid dreams of a youngster steeling for his first schoolyard fight, Flanagan’s brutally-honest prose floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee sent straight to the heart.”

Fight Night was recently published by XOXOX, located in Gambier, Ohio.

Thursday 3/22 @ 7pm Book Talk & Signing Wisdom Literature and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Please join us for a book talk and discussion with biblical scholar and MTSO Faculty member John Kampen.

He will speak on the Dead Sea Scrolls and his recent book Wisdom Literature.

Wisdom Literature is the first comprehensive commentary on the wisdom texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Kampen relates the body of wisdom literature discovered at Qumranto the larger wisdom tradition, to apocalyptic literature, to the Hebrew Scriptures, and to the New Testament, and he shows how these texts fit into and enhance our understanding of the complex social and intellectual history of Second Temple Judaism.

John Kampen is the Dunn Professor of Biblical Interpretation at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio. A recognized scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, he is the author of The Hasideans and the Origins of Pharisaism: A Study of 1 and 2 Maccabees and coeditor of a number of research volumes, the best known of which is (with Moshe Bernstein) Reading 4QMMT: New Perspectives on Qumran Law and History. He also is the author of numerous research articles and has served as co-chair of the Qumran Studies section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

For reviews for his book check out:    Eerdmans John Kampen