Bible Reading for the Biblically Illiterate - And We're All Illiterate! (1)
To open the Bible is to open ourselves to all manner of the strange, unexpected, and even bizarre. The tragedy is that we have misread it so ham-fistedly that we’ve driven all that out and domesticated the Bible’s message to the bourgeois and conventional nostrums of the religious, therapeutic, and political demands of being Americans. No wonder few want to read it or hear its message today. -The right celebrates the Bible’s supposed valorization of what they consider virtuous and the left follows suit from their perspective. -Others prize its daily inspiration and instructions for daily life. -Yet others turn it into a rule book or ethics manual supposing the Bible is about defining and enforcing conduct. -Some find in it a system of truth that gives them intellectual purchase on the issues of the day. And on it goes. The Bible endlessly subjected to the indignities of our misuse and our seeming inability to r...