Lamenting with Joni Mitchell

If a tree falls by an axe, the stump will, given enough time, grow back. Human beings who fall violently have no such hope–we never rise again.  With that image, from Job 17, the book’s title character indicts the violence of the LORD and the finality of that violence.  But many centuries later, in a very different book, Philip S. Thomas enlists that image to do very different rhetorical work, and that’s what we’re here to investigate.  Dr. Thomas’s new book Hope for a Tree: Artistic Afterlives of Job examines films and poetry and literary nonfiction and other artifacts that take up Job’s lines and do other things with them.  The investigation leads to persistently interesting questions that arise from traditions whose books are holy, and Christian Humanist Profiles is glad to welcome Dr. Thomas to Christian Humanist Profiles.