Bible

Jesus was pretty clear about divorce: it’s a sin. If you live in California you can sign a petition to make it illegal — and see how it feels to try to step on the civil rights of others.

In the Bible, God has a preference for the poor and outcast, but this message is lost on many contemporary readers. A new edition seeks to remedy this ignorance, even as it turns a tidy profit for the publisher.

Which raises the thorny question: what will the church do about that pesky “fidelity and chastity” clause?

Author Bruce Feiler is back from “walking the Bible” and is roaming the country, tracing Moses’ footsteps. But in his eagerness to make the prophet into a unifying symbol, he misses the true complexity of the relationship between religion and the secular in America.

Among the most surprising things about underground comics master R. Crumb’s new illustration of the first book of the Hebrew Bible is not only how straight he plays the visual translation, but also the affinity between his own sensibility and the fleshly materiality of Genesis.

Why is the character of Jesus so powerful? Why is he such a hit? Bestselling writer Mary Gordon re-reads the Gospels, asking these questions, among others, and trying to figure out why fundamentalist readings of scripture, grounded in fear and rage, have come to dominate the understanding of religion in this country.

Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis, wants to claim the Christian scriptures for conservatism. Why rewrite the Bible? Well, as everyone knows, Jesus is a pretty liberal dude. And everyone knows that “young girl” in Greek was really a euphemism for “bimbo.”

Legendary underground comics artist R. Crumb has produced a surprisingly reverent Book of Genesis. For real grotesquerie, you need to look back to the Bible of Basil Wolverton, an evangelical illustrator whose work dwelt on the bizarre and violent.

Forgiveness? Social justice? Not in the new conservative Bible, where the “full free-market meaning” of the Good Book is now revealed.

What the new Conservative Bible Project fails to grasp is that the Bible’s not there to provide timeless certainty but to provoke arguments and unsettle what it is that we think we know.