The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love
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John Shelby Spong was the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, NJ, for more than twenty years and is one of the world's leading spokespersons for an open, scholarly, and progressive Christianity. Bishop Spong has taught at Harvard, and at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkely, California. He has also lectured at universities, conference centres, and churches in North America, Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific. He is the author of 15 books including the bestselling Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, Living in Sin, Liberating the Gospels, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, and his latest book The Sins of Scripture. History will recognize him as one of the major change agents in modern Christianity.
From a review in the NY Times:
"This book is long overdue, because one of the biggest mistakes liberals have made has been to forfeit battles in which faith plays a crucial role. Religion has always been a central current of American life, and it is becoming more important in politics because of the new Great Awakening unfolding across the United States.
Yet liberals have tended to stay apart from the fray rather than engaging in it. In fact, when conservatives quote from the Bible to make moral points, they tend to quote very selectively. After all, while Leviticus bans gay sex, it also forbids touching anything made of pigskin (is playing football banned?) - and some biblical passages seem not so much morally uplifting as genocidal."