The Story of Hannah: A Reflection on The Torah and Inspiration

Hannah is a peasant girl living in the year 860 B.C. in a little village on a hillside in the Northern Kingdom....

Click to read more ...

Taking God on Faith: A Conversation (In Which I Say Too Much, Again)

But the devil (and the god) are in the details: it's one thing to object to something because "I cannot understand it" and quite another to object that "It makes no sense" or that "It is immoral."  It isn't that I can't understand the stoning of girls who don't bleed on their wedding nights.  I get it.  I really do. 

I just think it's totally immoral, and if God inspired those words, I want nothing to do with him.

Click to read more ...

Inspiration of Scripture and the Problem of Non-Virgins: A Conversation

Much of Protestant and Catholic tradition and practice rest on the idea of the "inspiration of scripture."

It's worth wondering what that phrase means.

First, then, here's an articulation of the problem from a friend's question: What does inspiration mean, and what meaning can it reasonably have given some of scripture's enormities?

Click to read more ...

Untangling Cliché: "God's Justice," Part II

"Such readers are probably right to accept all this justice-talk 'blindly' (because I think it really is blind): their religion begins (? and ends) with the Bible, which by the way is not biblical. But they should understand that they're using language in a way that the rest of us have no access to. Justice no longer means what we recognize as just, it just means what the most powerful person on the block (their god) is capable of doing. Might makes right, whatever he does is okay.

"So back to your question..."

Click to read more ...