All tagged bible
How should Christian readers respond to this work, readers whose scriptures extend beyond the Hebrew Bible, and whose peculiar approach to these texts, not as literary works but as the canonical witness to divine revelation, begins with an encounter with the risen Christ expounding Scripture on the road to Emmaus?
If it takes an imaginative leap to see the book, understood as an artefact or object, as a sign or symbol in Christian life, then this is perhaps down to sheer familiarity. Books are ubiquitous in Western culture. I sit writing this in one of my favourite places: an enormous bookshop in rural Warwickshire, consisting of multiple barns full of volumes on every imaginable topic. Even in the café I am surrounded by stacks of the things, I am resting my laptop on a few of my most treasured discoveries (books are working objects, after all).
If we knew any Arabic at all, there were two phrases familiar to Malaysian children, regardless of our religious or ethnic background. We woke up every morning to the azan—the call to prayer—which begins with the proclamation that God is great, followed by the affirmation that there is no God but God, and that Muhammad is his prophet. [...]
