The uneasy genre of biblical fiction often includes what Flannery O’Connor called the “shoddy religious novel,” filled with shallow characters and plot structures as clichéd and melodramatic as 1950s biblical films.
Books
Engaging the Word
The New Testament and the Christian Believer
by Jaime Clark-Soles
Galatians
A Commentary
by Martinus C. de Boer
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jesus
Reading the Gospels on the Ground
by Bruce N. Fisk
John in the Company of Poets
The Gospel in Literary Imagination
by Thomas Gardner
Shaping the Scriptural Imagination
Truth, Meaning, and the Theological Interpretation of the Bible
by Donald H. Juel; edited by Shane Berg and Matthew L. Skinner
Sexuality in the New Testament
Understanding the Key Texts
by William Loader
Historical Jesus
What Can We Know and How Can We Know It?
by Anthony Le Donne
Remember the Poor
Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World
by Bruce W. Longenecker
Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit
Jewish Daily Life in the Time of Jesus
by Jodi Magness
Paul, the Corinthians and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics
Before my children were able to read they knew several stories by heart. The stories were picture book favorites that we read to them again and again. When I dared to skip a page or change a word, they would protest, “Mom! That’s not what it says. Read it right.”
An old insurance company term for natural disasters is “acts of God,” which unfortunately links the Holy One with everything awful and unforeseen that can befall humanity, as if God were not just capricious but wrathful and cruel.
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