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NORMAN JENSEN, who received the name Joseph when he entered religious life, was born on November 22, 1924, in Mannheim, Illinois, and spent the first four years of his life on his family's truck farm there. The family then moved to Chicago, where he received his elementary and secondary education. When he was nineteen, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, in which he served from 1943 to 1945, being commissioned a second lieutenant in May 1945. He returned to Chicago for a brief time after the war, but in 1946 he traveled to Washington to enter the Benedictine community of St. Anselm's Priory, having learned of the monastery from a military chaplain who was himself a monk. At St. Anselm's, Norman Jensen received a new name and found a permanent home, where he has resided ever since.
Joseph Jensen professed his first vows as a Benedictine monk on February 10,1948, the feast of St. Scholastica, and was ordained to the priesthood on August 15,1954, the feast of the Assumption. He received a B.A. from the Catholic University of America in 1951, an S.T.L. from the Collegio di Sant'Anselmo (Rome) in 1955, an S.S.L. from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in 1968, and an S.T.D. from The Catholic University of America in 1971, submitting his dissertation under the direction of the renowned scholar of Semitics Patrick W. Skehan. A shortened and revised form of this dissertation, The Use o/tôrâ in Isaiah: His Debate with the Wisdom Tradition, appeared as the third volume in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series in 1973.
From 1955 to 1962, Joseph Jensen taught at St. Anselm's Abbey School, and from 1956 to 1965 he taught Scripture in the Abbey's seminary. His longest and most important academic appointment, however, has been to The Catholic University of America, where he has taught the Old Testament from 1961 to the present, first in the Department of Religion and Religious Education and now in the newly formed School of Theology and Religious Studies. In 1970, he succeeded Louis Hartman as executive secretary of the Catholic Biblical Association of America, a position which he has held ever since and by virtue of which most of his colleagues know him as Mr. CBA. In a word, Joseph...