I told my RE students last Sunday that we would be finishingour study of the Old Testament that day. We covered some Prophetic books (Malachi, Obadiah, Joel, Daniel, andJonah) and Historical books (Esther, Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, and 2Maccabees). Since this is my first yearteaching 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 Maccabeescover a lot of history that I broke down into a timeline on the whiteboard. The textbook started with 323 B.C. when Judahwas under Syrian-Mesopotamian rule and then jumped to 175 B.C. when the kingwas warned about the Roman Empire’s intent to invade. The king’s name wasn’t provided, so I did anInternet 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 Jewsdetested the Greek gods and found certain Greek practices offensive, such asnude wrestling and homosexuality. Given today’s liberal pro-choice climate, I researched abortionin 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, Iasked if they could name some Greek gods and they did: Zeus, Apollo, Poseidon,etc.
My thought for today: Catholic parents must learn theirfaith in order to pass it on to their children. By solely exposing them to secularist and materialistic forms ofentertainment and education in books, movies, video gaming, phone apps, etc.,they risk leading their children astray from their faith, sometimes to thepoint of abandoning it altogether. 
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