A Sound of Sheer Silence

In case you think the Bible is irrelevant: The Book of Esther features a rich, bumbling, & misogynistic king with a fragile ego who relies his racist advisors to tell him what to do. He is ultimately bested by an orphan girl & some eunuchs. #HappyPurim ! — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 1, 2018 Not sure what you mean by "literal," but I never said it was. It's a satirical diaspora story of resistance & Jewish survival, a sort of Persian "dark comedy," likely based on history but not a straightforward recitation of fact. LOTS more options than "literal" vs. "fairy tale." — Rachel Held Evans (@rachelheldevans) March 2, 2018 What struck me about this exchange is how it reveals a way of thinking about stories and how they work.  Rachel Held Evans asserts that the story of Esther is relevant and important to our current situation.  Based on that assertion, her conversation partner immediately jumped to the concl...

The danger with asking complicated questions is that you sometimes forget to ask the simpler, foundational questions.  Rob Bell's new book, entitled What is the Bible? ,   asks a simple question, but in so asking it exposes a truly fundamental issue about how one approaches religion.  In asking "what is the Bible?", Bell asks the reader to consider the question of how we understand what these sacred texts are and what they are supposed to represent.  If you don't get that right, then you will inevitably lost in the weeds. Let's look at this from might seem like a strange place--a comparative look at the three great monotheistic faiths.  The name for the holy text of Islam is al-Quran , which translates to something like "the Recitation."  According to Islamic theology (as I understand it), the angel Gabriel appeared to the Prophet Muhammad and recited (hence the name) the Quranic text to him, and Muhammad in turn wrote in down into the form we have tod...