SELBL - Society for English Learning Through Bibical Literature看聖經學英語

I'd like to introduce a website that will help you learn English and know more about Biblical literature.

Enjoy it!

Terri

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SELBL - Society for English Learning Through Bibical Literature:

"The Bible is arguably the most influential text in all of Western culture. English professors from different universities overwhelmingly agree that “an educated person needs to know about the Bible”. The Bible is the source of inspiration for numerous writers, including Shakespeare. It is also a major source of English idioms. If you “go the extra mile” to help your friend, “eat, drink and be merry” during happy hours, you are quoting from the Bible.

This website is your perfect companion for looking up idioms and names originated from the Bible. You can sort it by alphabetical order or by the book in the Bible. It contains a wealth of learning resources for learners and teachers of English. We hope that this website can inspire you with a new way of learning English more effectively, more engagingly and more fun!"

Professors and scholars from various disciplines do not just read the Bible, they recommend us to read and use it in schools if you are English teachers.

Prof. Barbara Newman, Northwestern University: “The Bible has been the most influential text in all of Western culture. It’s difficult to understand medieval or early modern or much of modern literature without knowing it…This is true for teaching Chaucer, but it’s also true for teaching Toni Morrison as much. And obviously a knowledge of the Bible is indispensable.” *

Prof. Ulrich Knoefplmacher, Princeton University, “In English tradition and also for an American tradition begun by Puritan writers, a knowledge of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is even more crucial than classical references. For students not to have that is almost crippling in their ability to be sophisticated readers.” *

Prof. Robert Kiely, Harvard University, “I can only say that if a student doesn’t know any Bible literature, he or she will simply not understand whole elements of Shakespeare, Sidney, Spenser, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth.” *

Prof. Gerald L. Bruns, University of Notre Dame, “You can’t really study Western literature intelligently or coherently without starting with the Bible.” *

Prof. Steven Goldsmith, University of California at Berkeley, “It’s not that it’s impossible to read some writers without a Biblical background, but that you would miss a whole dimension to their work. When people meet William Blake without a background in the Bible, he seems eccentric, merely visionary author, quite obscure…If you have a Biblical background, you can begin to see how his thinking and how his imagination is grounded in some of this entrance of literature and it gives you a much more solid framework for understanding where he comes from culturally, and not just reading him as idiosyncratic.” *

Prof. Roland M. Frye, the late Schelling Professor Emeritus of English Literature, University of Pennsylvania, “a familiar understanding of Christian doctrine in historical perspective thus contributes to a fuller appreciation of Shakespeare’s art, but Shakespeare’s art is not devoted to theologizing the theatre.” **

http://www.selbl.org/