Weekend Reading

An eclectic collection of articles for your weekend reading enjoyment.

• Religion Today has re-posted an article that originally was published in The Christian Century in 2004.  “Learning to Read the Bible Again” is an introduction to nine theses on how the Bible can be interpreted faithfully.  There is much to be appreciated in the depth and brevity of this piece.  If reading scripture is an art, there follows one more conclusion: we learn the practice of an art through apprenticeship to those who have become masters. We come to read scripture imaginatively and well only by learning from those who have gone before us and performed, in their lives of embodied faithfulness, beautiful interpretations of scripture.
• “Nobody Gets Married Any More, Mister” is an essay by a Connecticut public school teacher about the acceptance and expectation even of teen pregnancy among his students.  In today’s urban high school, there is no shame or social ostracism when girls become pregnant. Other girls in school want to pat their stomachs. Their friends throw baby showers at which meager little gifts are given. After delivery, the girls return to school with baby pictures on their cell phones or slipped into their binders, which they eagerly share with me.
• Matthew Sutton reviews a book for Books and Culture that shows trends in Liberal and Evangelical churches aren’t what you might expect, even in the Pacific Northwest.  Liberal Protestants and their allies are facing off against the aggressive, entrepreneurial, community-oriented conservatives in the area. What is surprising is that in this tie-dye drenched, hippie-loving university town, best known for its thriving farmers market, co-op grocery store, and natural beauty, the conservatives are winning.
• Finally, an essay by George Orwell published in 1946, “Why I Write.” The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.