Old Time Religion

When I was in graduate school, Dennis Covington’s Salvation On Sand Mountain was a controversial book. My school was quite particular about “human subjects.” If you merely wanted to conduct a short interview with someone for research purposes, you had to go through a lot of red tape with a department of human subjects that monitored such a process. In theory, this was all for the protection of both the interviewee and interviewer, and everything had to have clear boundaries. For instance, say you wanted to research religious snake handling in Appalachia, you certainly wouldn’t have been allowed to handle snakes yourself or, perhaps worse yet, actually preach at one the churches you’re studying. Luckily, Covington wasn’t an academic at my school, he would have been thrown out, but he did stir up a lot of debate there when his book came out. Why? Because he did handle snakes, he did preach, and he was constantly crossing personal and professional lines. Somehow while researching and writing about the Glenn Summerford attempted murder trial (Summerford was convicted of trying to kill his wife by forcing her at gunpoint to stick her hands in the cages of venomous snakes) for the New York Times, his quest to find family identity and ethnic roots got tied up with a group of snake handlers meeting in the rural areas of Alabama. What follows is a strange and honest essay about his own relationship with the Spirit, the intricate and political relationships in rural church life, and patriarchy. Not a small task or a light subject.

But if your tastes are less exotic, you may prefer Jack Miles’ God: A Biography. Miles knows his stuff; he’s a former Catholic seminarian. He takes the Old Testament/Hebrew Scriptures and looks at it from the point of view of a literary critic. What kind of character is God? What are Her/His motivations? What can we tell from His/Her actions? It’s all really fascinating stuff. Surprisingly (or perhaps not), God isn’t always clear in conviction, action, word, or promise. And He/She often exhibits the same fears, angers, loves, and frustrations as humans. But is that surprising from a literary character? There's also a sequel: Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.

--Jason