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Showing posts from February, 2018

Unbelievable. Book Review

I'd read only one of John Shelby Spong's books before I read this one. Back in the day I'd found  his Rescuing The Bible From Fundamentalism , by turns helpful, illuminating and infuriating. Helpful and illuminating because it articulated many of my own opinions about the Bible, and infuriating because the scholarship was at times careless and because Spong's own claims for his opinions and for himself were not as unarguable as he pretended they were.  I've had a pretty similar reaction to this book. Unbelievable is 319 pages long including footnotes and index, and is printed on odd, lightweight paper by Harper Collins. It was published this year. Central to this book is the observation -pretty obvious and incontrovertible, really - that an experience and the description of that experience are two different things. Experiences can sometimes be universal, that is, they have a constancy over time and space, but the explanation given to the experience is cultur