However, Vatsala is smitten by VJ Ronit Oberoi and this forms the crux of a triangle love story. Nikita Singh keeps the story simple. The Facebook conversations scattered between paragraphs add to the unique appeal of the book.
Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.
half baked love story ebook 16
Whether one loves her for her scalawag ghosts or her mother-daughter tyrannies, Amy Tan has amassed legions of faithful readers in the 16 years since the publication of her first novel, ''The Joy Luck Club." At the time she was one of a handful of writers who signaled a surge in Asian-American fiction, in large part because she rendered her female characters -- young and old, fierce and milquetoast -- with such intimate authority. Whatever half-baked ideas the dominant culture harbored about the velvet shackles of a close-knit Chinese-American family, Tan embroidered them in her fiction into a tapestry as revealing in its intricate despotism as it was heartrendingly universal.
In a concession to lipstick feminism, or more likely the Don Winslow pulp fiction novel the screenplay is adapted from, the story is narrated by O (for Ophelia, a half-baked nod to Shakespeare), who as played by Blake Lively is not much of a revelation. Despite her seemingly exotic choice of being in love with and cohabiting with two men, Lively comes off as nothing more than a sorority queen in made-from-hemp halter tops, her eroticism consisting of the blank, stoned stare of a vegan foodie at Sunday brunch.
I have never been particularly secretive that my main religious love affair beyond Christianity has been with Judaism. What that has meant to me has changed over time: from very vague, generalized, uneducated sentiments about what Judaism is or must be like as a child to high school interaction with a local Reform synagogue to sustained academic study of Second Temple or \u201CEarly\u201D Judaism (the formative period of Judaism from 586 BCE to 70 CE, when the Temple was destroyed, or to 136 CE, when the Bar Kokhba Revolt was ended, or to 200 CE, when the Mishnah was compiled) to contemporary recombination of academic knowledge of Jewish origins and history with living engagement with the Jewish community in my daily work. The living, breathing, life-affirming, physical, emotional, revolutionary, progressive, mystical, celebrative ruach of postbiblical Judaism\u2014especially in its Renewal, Reform, and Conservative traditions of contemporary worship, and in its kabbalistic, ecological iterations\u2014has been and remains a religious resource that is not infrequently more attractive to me than my own available liturgical practice in the Christian world. There is something lively and intimate, for example, about the procession of a sefer Torah, something enchanted about praying in Hebrew, something lovely I have experienced at tefilah that is often (though not always) missing from my experience of Christian worship. And Jewish habits of reading Scripture\u2014meticulously, deliberatively, dialectically, halakhically, midrashically, all of it\u2014often strike me as more learned, more careful, and more integral than Christian habits both ancient and modern. There are of course exceptions: I think Origen may have been the greatest biblical interpreter in all of Jewish and Christian history, and Philo of Alexandria a close second or even rival to him. But in general, one is likely to learn more not only about Jewish texts but also about Christian ones from Jewish scholars than they are from many a Christian scholar, theologian, homilist, or apologist. People like Drs. Amy-Jill Levine, Paula Fredriksen, Marc Zvi Brettler, Mark Nanos, and Daniel Boyarin are all in general better expositors of the meaning of New Testament texts in their first-century Jewish context than some of the popular in-house Christian names for that kind of thing in the broader Anglophone sphere, which is to say, one is more likely to learn more about the Jewishness and therefore the history and thought of Jesus, his Mother, the apostles, Paul, and the earliest generations of Jesus\u2019 followers from these scholars than they are from the giants of previous generations of scholarship like E.P. Sanders, N.T. Wright, and James DG Dunn. Indeed, the entire significance of Jesus is explicable within Judaism by reference to a variety of paradigms that do not in general require the apologetic, defensive hand-wringing that characterizes so much of Christian history and present discourse. Jews have the option of simply ignoring Jesus, which has been the dominant attitude of most Jews throughout their history (a not insignificant point for anyone devoted to Jesus, given that he himself was a practicing Jew who did not seek the establishment of a new religion); regretting him as a failed could-have-been, would-have been messiah; maligning him as a false messiah, a false prophet, and a twister of the words of the Torah; honoring him as a martyr for the cause of Jewish nationalism and independence against Roman oppressors; welcoming him as a fellow pious and zealous Jew, hailing him as an important Jewish teacher or sage, even as a social prophet of God\u2019s justice and mercy for the poor and the marginalized, as a serious halakhic contender and scriptural exegete alongside both Early Jewish and later rabbinic authorities. In one case, that of Pinchas Lapide, it was even possible for a Jewish scholar and Orthodox rabbi to affirm Jesus\u2019 resurrection as a historical reality and as a sign of divine vindication, without however understanding it as an affirmation of Jesus\u2019 messianic identity or of the ultimate truth of Christianity. Even at this far end of the spectrum, the Maimonidean assessment of both Christianity and Islam\u2014that they are praeparatio evangelica or messianica, in lieu of a future (naturalistic) advent of Israel\u2019s restoration\u2014endures, albeit with a new assessment of Jesus\u2019 significance that is more agreeable to Christians and Muslims even if it is not finally agreeable to either one.
I confess that Lapide\u2019s position, were it mainstream and normative within Judaism, would probably be sufficient to convince me personally that Christianity\u2019s truth was at best half-baked, and that its historical trajectory as a sociopolitical and cultural phenomenon so ubiquitously guilty of betraying Jesus\u2019 preaching of God\u2019s Kingdom in alignment with the ideals of Jewish Scripture would be easily explicable as simple aberration from an aboriginal moment of genuine apocalypse. Frankly, it is worth pointing out that the traditional Jewish position that this is true even without affirming the apocalyptic character of Jesus\u2019 person, life, death, resurrection, and exaltation is a serious and considerable counternarrative for Christian claims that more simply and succinctly explains both the delay of the parousia and the historical apostasies of the Christian Churches from their founding ideals than Christian apologiai and apologoi frequently do. And given that these latter, more positive assessments of Jesus by scholars who have studied and written on the New Testament in its Jewish context and who often function in ecumenical, interfaith contexts where many of their colleagues are sincere Christians academically committed and engaged in the Jewish-Christian relationship have yet to filter down to the ordinary lay level of Jewish consciousness in most synagogues, just as the new positions on Jews and Judaism outlined by most Western Christians in the wake of the Shoah and the Second Vatican Council have yet to make their way into the ordinary consciousness of most Christians, lay or clerical, who continue to engage in lazy stereotypes about Jews and Judaism both ancient and modern in their reading of Scripture, their approach to mission and interfaith work, and their understanding of Christ\u2019s significance, it is likely that most people on the ground who felt themselves caught between Christianity and Judaism would simply encounter these two narratives: one in which the dilemma was between trying to explain why, if Jesus is the messiah, the messianic kingdom did not arrive with him and transform the world, and instead his followers harshly persecuted Jews and suppressed Jewish observance of Torah, and one in which Jesus, whatever his significance, was simply the catalyst for an aberrant form of Judaism that went on to have a corrupted gentile afterlife to the great regret of most Jews of the last two millennia. To choose the former, Christian option on the grounds of some idea that it better explains the data of history, and especially the messianic deficiencies of history, than the Jewish perspective is a bad reason to be Christian.
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