I told my RE students last Sunday that we would be finishing
our study of the Old Testament that day.
We covered some Prophetic books (Malachi, Obadiah, Joel, Daniel, and
Jonah) and Historical books (Esther, Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, and 2
Maccabees). Since this is my first year
teaching a bible class, I developed lesson plans beforehand that required research into events and ideas presented in the textbook.
In particular, the First and Second books of Maccabees
cover a lot of history that I broke down into a timeline on the whiteboard. The textbook started with 323 B.C. when Judah
was under Syrian-Mesopotamian rule and then jumped to 175 B.C. when the king
was warned about the Roman Empire’s intent to invade. The king’s name wasn’t provided, so I did an
Internet search that led me to the Jewish Virtual Library: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Greeks.html. Alexander the Great had conquered Persia; consequently,
Judah had fallen to the Greeks. The Jews
detested the Greek gods and found certain Greek practices offensive, such as
nude wrestling and homosexuality.
Given today’s liberal pro-choice climate, I researched abortion
in ancient Greek culture and found it to be an acceptable practice. This topic wasn’t discussed with my students,
but aware of highly popular Greek mythology books published by Scholastic, I
asked if they could name some Greek gods and they did: Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon,
etc.
My thought for today: Catholic parents must learn their
faith in order to pass it on to their children.
By solely exposing them to secularist and materialistic forms of
entertainment and education in books, movies, video gaming, phone apps, etc.,
they risk leading their children astray from their faith, sometimes to the
point of abandoning it altogether. 
