American Talmud
The American Bible, Stephen Prothero’s latest assault on the best-seller lists, is a compendium of writings that, Prothero insists, together define Americans as a nation. “Words matter,” he tells us in the introduction, and conversations about our identity as a people are essential to our common life. “In every generation our pluribus threatens to overtake our unum,” he writes; “in every generation the nation must be imagined anew.”