Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to that Makes Total Sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian, aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice, but the how sometimes eludes us. That makes total sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice. Practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Oh, my gosh, David. I was supposed to take a break from all reading materials except for the novel that's on my nightstand.
At least on Sunday. I had committed to myself just on Sunday. I'm just gonna chill. I'm in the middle of finals, like, as we're recording this, and I was like, my brain just needs a break. I've got one of these, you know, whatever bestseller novels on my. On my nightstand.
And then this book.
I broke all my commitments, and I just read it in the morning on Sunday.
We skipped service. I read it in the afternoon on Sunday with my dogs and a cup of coffee.
And it's your fault because I couldn't stop turning the pages. So thank you so much. I can't wait to talk with you about it, and I'm so grateful.
[00:01:41] Speaker B: Well, Alexis, first of all, thank you so much for having me on your show. I am very much looking forward to this conversation, and my ego is just growing, like, three times as large as it normally is.
And I am very grateful for your kind words, and I put a lot of work into the words in this book, as every writer does, but there's no greater compliment than the one that you just gave, that you found a voice that was welcoming to you and made you want to keep reading. Thank you. Thank you for that.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Yeah. I want to say the name of the book right now because even the title is so intriguing. There's no subtitle. So. This is called the. The Accessorized Bible by my guest today, David Dalt. And it is. People can see. I'll put a link for it in the show notes, but people can see the COVID It is like a Bible inside a book. Kind of is how it looks, but the front of it is. You can tell it's one of the. I can feel it. It feels like a Pew Bible. I mean, you know, like, in my imagination, of course, it's just a slick cover, but it feels like a Pew Bible in my imagination. And it's adorned with different colored stars, like you might put teachers in my day. Right. We'll get there. You Describe a phone book. So we're growing up in this similar era, but people would, you know, teachers would put these stars on it. Anyway, the Accessorized Bible, before we get into the meat of it, I feel like I want to start there because you no doubt have had people look at you weird, or people say, what is this? And so from my perspective as a reader, the title was explored all throughout the book and it kind of compounded on each other as the chapters went on. But when people stop you, as they say, so they say in an elevator, what do you tell them it means? What do you tell them when they say the accessorized Bible? What is that? What do you mean by that?
[00:03:38] Speaker B: When we got started, the good folks at Yale and I all thought that we were writing a book about weird Bibles. And when we inked the contract for this, it was the heyday of Borders and Barnes and Noble, and you could go into their Bible Bible section and you could see all manner of shapes and sizes of Bibles that were trying to catch your eye. And I don't just mean different translations and versions, but I mean things like a fireman's Bible, a policeman's Bible, various types of women's Bibles, the Golfer's Bible, the NASCAR Bible. And so we all thought that this was what the title was about. The accessoration of the accessorization of Bibles around identities.
And then life happened. I kept working the book, thinking about the book, I kept blowing deadlines, I kept frustrating my editors. But there was something else that, that was not there in that approach.
And what eventually emerged was I'm not just talking about the different shapes and identities of Bibles, but I'm also thinking philosophically about the other side of the word accessory, how we use a Bible as an accessory to the violence and crimes that we do to each other. And so as that unfolded for me, I suddenly realized, oh, this is a.
And I'm so grateful to my editors at Yale and to everyone else who has supported me through the multi year writing and rewriting process of this book for it to become what it is. So right now, the title has remained the same throughout the project. We all love the idea of the Accessorized Bible, but now it is much more capacious. It has many more mansions in it than when we first started. And so it swings both ways. It is talking about the various ways that we identify and use the Bible to sort of augment our identities and how we adorn our Bibles with various types of things like stickers or like Writing in the margins or duct tape, to quote my friend Dorina Parmenter. But it also talks about the way in which we use the Bible as a kind of COVID or beard for harm to each other. And that's really, to me now, the much more interesting question.
[00:05:47] Speaker A: Yeah, the book is laid out in kind of three sections. The first section, I have it in my notes as like a tools section section. So you kind of lay out your methodology. How are you. How are you looking at this? Where. Where are you coming from?
You know, you list things like scriptural reasoning as. As an area in which, you know, a hermeneutic for. For this topic. And then.
And then you end with a. A beautiful, beautiful conclusion on a phrasing that you call catastrophic love, where we see James Baldwin reenter the conversation he was there at.
And had me kind of looking up some of those historical things that I don't remember if that was in the conclusion of the second chapter where I was like, oh, this. This happened. Or, wow, what. Like, what a. What an amazing, intriguing photograph or things like that. But just really, you know, spoiler alert to that one. But just comparing what would happen if someone had an individual for whom they felt that kind of love. And then how can we extrapolate that into, you know, into society. Society, which is very beautiful.
And then you have the section in the middle that beckoned me over the weekend, and that's these four theses. And I'm going to just kind of list them, and then we can. And then we can talk through them.
The last one is the Bible as accessory.
And then the three before that are the Bible as a book, the Bible as a platform, and the Bible as community.
And I want to. I mean, I know it's weird. We're kind of just like jumping off the high dive here. But if we could start with the Bible as a book.
If you say this out loud and everyone's like, duh. I mean, you know, like, I'm like, okay, listeners, stay with us. You know, like. But the Bible as a book, you're like, yeah, the Bible is a book.
But a couple of the things that drew my attention in your discussion of the Bible as a book were a book is a. On my notes, a particular way of paying attention.
Oh. Which I loved as a reader. I mean, most folks listening to this podcast know I often have authors on. I read every book that when I have a guest, I love to read. And it is, as you say, a particular way of paying attention.
It is also a political arrangement, which. That Just like that one blew me away.
And so I wanted so to let you know those are where my mind was going. We talked about the Bible as a book, but I'm going to let you kind of introduce it and maybe kind of riff because you give this example. We're both going to date ourselves, David, in this conversation, just so you know, we're both here. And this. You start this off with one of my. The movies that I grew up with because of my dad, shout out to my dad, Steve Martin movie, the Jerk, where I can see it in my head when he is freaking out. Steve Martin's character is freaking out because someone is shooting those cans.
He really hates those cans. But the shooting of the cans came from a person's interaction with a book.
Go for it.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: So there's a lot in your question. Let me try and stack it in an order here. So, first of all, thank you for going to this particular section of the book, the Four Theses.
I'm really grateful for that.
You're talking right now about these two phrases.
A book is a particular way of paying attention, and a book is a political arrangement. And neither of those phrases are original to me. A book is a way of paying attention comes from my dear friend John Sweeney, a wonderful author and publisher. And the book, as a political arrangement comes from a sort of refraction of an observation made by a person, a fellow Chicagoan, but somebody that I never got the chance to meet or interact with, but a real kind of sort of luminary for me, a music engineer by the name of Steve Albini. And he talked about bands and rock and roll bands as political arrangements. So what am I doing here? Well, in the whole of this section, I'm trying to interrupt that kind of duh response that you just mentioned, which is it's a very kind of everyday thing to say, well, a Bible is a book. And everyone is going to say, of course a Bible is a book. But we don't stop to think about what a book does as a technology and what a book does as a technology. And you mentioned having that best seller on your nightstand.
When we get lost in a book, we forget that we're holding paper and ink and something takes over and we begin to have a kind of hyperactivity of our imagination.
And in a. In a fantasy, fantasy book that places us in a world that could never possibly exist. But when it's a book that has some kind of historical anchor, we start to think that we're seeing through the book and instead seeing the history behind it, or the facts behind it, or the reality behind it, and we imagine somehow that the book disappears.
What was in my mind a lot in this chapter, I don't mention it specifically, but one of my mentors and eventually came to be a friend in the last years of his life, Walter Brueggemann, made a kind of side comment at one point when he and I were working together when I was studying under him, and he said, I'm really not looking for the God behind the text. I'm looking for the God in the text.
And that stuck with me because that was a way of illustrating what I'm trying to do here. I'm not trying to have the book in our hands be some kind of magical object that somehow shows us the truth of the world behind it. I'm trying to really have us stick with, you know, the object in our hands. But even when we do that, even when we say, well, I've got a book in my hands, we tend to then abstract that and say, well, a book is a book is a book. No, the book in your hands came from a particular bookstore or a particular book distributor. It was involved in a particular publication process that involved editors and others who are largely unseen. It involved typesetters, and it may have involved jumping back and forth between continents in terms of its content and its information.
And then it involves peer review, oftentimes for a book that is scholarly. And those are oftentimes unseen hands in this as well. And then there's the author and all of the things that the author is bringing in terms of inspiration, in terms of background, in terms of all that. So all of those invisible parts of this thing that we're calling a book, well, when we get to an object that we call a book Bible, that's multiplied a thousandfold, a hundred thousand fold. Because we now don't just have all of the contemporary processes of publication, but we have 2,000 years of scholars and scribes sort of copying, making errors. We have the assembly of texts literally out of fragments found in trash heaps.
And in the process of this, we now think that we have a solid book that is never changing. In is the eternal word of God. Well, I want to interrupt all of that, and I want to remind us that a book is a particular type of technology, and that as we interact with that technology, we are simultaneously paying a particular type of attention. And that attention is actually pretty recent in human consciousness.
And we are also involving ourselves in a set of political arrangements. And I'm meaning that in the most basic Sense of, of a series of decisions have been made about how we use materials and finances.
Someone chose to publish this book. Someone chose to publish the book this way as opposed to some other way. And you're implicated in that. Carl Rahner has a famous illustration. He says, you go to the grocery store and you pick up a banana and you don't think about all the hands and all the processes that were involved in bringing that banana to you and allowing you to pick it up and eat it for like $0.59 or whatever it costs to buy one banana these days. But he says, says all of those aspects are still on the banana. They're just invisible to you. And I wanted to do a similar kind of thing with the book and with the concept of the book. But now you have raised this issue of Steve Martin. And I want to make sure we don't lose the listeners here. So in the 1979 Carl Rahner film the Jerk, this was Steve Martin, the famous comedian. His first jump into film.
He had been a very successful stand up comedian. He had been on Saturday Night Live, but now he'd made the jump to the big screen. And the movie is a series of kind of vignettes. And the character that Martin plays, Navon R. Johnson, I don't know whether it's a schlemiel or a schlamazel, but he's basically a character to whom everything bad always happens all the time. And so as he moves from scene to scene, he's continually in a bad situation after a bad situation. And anything good has to then immediately be sort of countered by something awful. So he gets something good. He gets a job at a filling station where he's helping to pump gas. And he has another success.
He gets his name in the phone book. And he feels elated that his name is in the phone book in the very next scene. We're now in an interior shot. The camera is going over somebody's shoulder and a finger is going down in that same phone book and touching on Nathan Johnson's name. And we hear the voice say, die, Navon R. Johnson.
And then as you mentioned in the next scene, this, this, the character is named the madman in the credits, this madman is now sitting in a car with a rifle shooting at Nathan Johnson just to try and kill him for no other reason than he found his name in a phone book. And this, this becomes in the movie the kind of thing that propels Steve Martin's character into the next set of scenes. But it is like something good happens. And this is the horrible thing that pushes him into the next scene. So it's supposed to be funny, but I wanted to linger on that because, you know, you mentioned that we're of a certain age. A phone book was literally just a list of names, addresses and numbers. It had no narrative. It had no story. It had nothing.
Nevertheless, this madman is using this book that has nothing but data in it, names, addresses and numbers to make the most important decision anyone could make, who should live and who should die. And what I want to extrapolate from this is if we can do that with a telephone book, book that has no story, that gives us no commands, that does nothing, how much more? So are we doing it with a book like a Bible? When a Bible is saying, thou shalt not or thou shalt and we then sort of look at this and we say, well, the Bible told me that this person is not allowed to use the bathroom in public. They're not allowed to share the bathroom with other people. Or the Bible told me that this person can't marry this other person. Or the Bible told me that we should put this particular person in a cage because they're the wrong color or they don't have the right papers because you're not supposed to cross a border. And, you know, the book of Romans says you're supposed to. Supposed to follow all the laws and everything like that.
But what I want to point out in interrupting the notion of the book. Ness. Of all this is that the book's not doing anything. A book is an object.
What is doing the motor power here is us.
We are doing this violence. And we are then saying, well, the book told me to in the same way that the madman is picking up a rifle, going to find Nathan Johnson, and trying to kill Nathan Johnson. But if anyone was to stop him and say, why are you doing this? He would say, well, the telephone book told me to. But the book doesn't tell you the book is an object. Your interpretation, the way that you are utilizing this is the entire moral framework here. But you're using the book as, in this case, an accessory to your crime. So that brings us back full circle to the title. But that's kind of what I'm trying to do in this chapter about a Bible being a book. But having said all this and set the stage for you and your listeners, I'm happy to play with this idea as much as you want.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: Okay, good. Because something came to my mind that did not come to my mind while I was reading it, and that is to go to the Political arrangement. So on a side note, I will say the particular way of paying attention, it made me look up. I read Steve Martin's memoir a couple of years ago on the beach. I remember where I was when I was reading it. And part of it is because I grew up being such a fan. My dad was a big fan. I'm still a big fan of Steve Martin.
I could hear him narrate the book.
I could imagine scenes in the book that I had never been privy to in media before just because of my interaction with Steve Martin's character. We'll get there partially in the Bible as community a minute. We're talking about those one way relationships we have with characters sometimes.
But that's kind of a side note. But that is just kind of for me, like a real way I can kind of put my hands on this particular way of paying attention.
But the political arrangement. Let's go back to the phone book for just a second. And we like, you don't have to riff here, but this is just what came to my mind. So I'm just gonna say it.
The phone book has no narrative. But for those of us who remember a phone book, it was even a political arrangement.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Oh, for sure.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: I'm thinking about why so many, you know, double A Pest control. Every small town in America probably has AA Pest control. Why? It wasn't because, because the business owner had any particular reason to name themselves aa. That wasn't in their initials or anything like that. It was so that they could be placed first in the yellow Pages, in the pest control section of the yellow pages. Or, you know, our phone books growing up had advertisements on the covers or you know, some of the yellow pages had a bigger ad or, you know, I remember being friends with a, a student at my school whose dad was a physician and he, they had their home phone number listed under his wife's maiden name. Right. So his, so his, you know, patients couldn't just like randomly call him at home, you know, at 6pm on a Sunday night or whatever.
But even thinking about something as simple as that, you know.
Yes. There's all of the other things that you've mentioned when somebody puts a book proposal in. Publishers are asking how many people know who you are like you. You. Just because something is or isn't published doesn't necessarily mean that these are the best or most intriguing ideas out there. They just might happen to come from people who more people know about, you know, as an example. But all of these things being political and so when we take it to The Bible, which is kind of your Pauline, like, how much more statement there?
It's one of those things that kind of. It has always driven me nuts, but it started to drive me nuts even more when I was in my m. Div. Because it's kind of this, like, bumper sticker, you know, practical theology of the Bible says it and I believe it, and there it is, you know, And I'm like, the Bible says it, but which version of the Bible says it? And not just which translation, but which, you know. And then you get into textual criticism and, you know, kind of all of these things that you alluded to, to earlier, which says, wow, the Bible is a political arrangement.
And then, you know, to go back to the other statement that I kind of pulled from that chapter, and it is a particular way of paying attention. You know, I think about something that is present in my life right now because I'm a woman with a ministerial degree, and I'm like, there's like a whole lot of people. I was just reading a different book today, you know, stats like in the 30s of 30% of evangelicals, for example, who believe that women, you know, can serve in certain areas of ministry. But I'm like, but nobody is throwing a fit over whether or not we have our heads covered in any sort of worship service or when we're praying in any kind of way. Because the Bible is a book, so it's requires a purge or it is a particular way of paying attention. And so we're paying attention to some of these places where Paul might say, women need to be silent. But we're not not paying particular attention to the places where Paul also says that we need to have our heads covered. Because I don't really see many of the same people saying, yes, but if you're going to come in, you need to have, you know, a scarf on your. On your head, but you can't stand in front of the pulpit. So anyway, no particular question there. Just kind of like throwing those things out for fodder and saying, david, do you have anything to add to that? If not, we'll move on to the next thesis.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: Well, first of all, I'm just again, delighted that this particular chapter caught your attention in this particular way and that you have used it in such really connective ways. And you're getting exactly what I'm trying to talk about here. So we mentioned that a telephone book doesn't have any particular narrative, if we're honest about the structure of our Bibles. Our Bibles do not have narratives.
If you look at the four Gospels together, they have been narrativized, but when you actually look at them together, they do not present you a coherent story in the way that we currently understand anything like narrative, particularly in the, you know, the 2000s when we're, we're so concerned with like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the three act structure and, and everything having a payoff. Like the, the Gospels don't work that way. And other, what we call narratives in the Bible, in the Old Testament and the New Testament don't work that way, but we narrativize them. And, and this is, as you've said, a particular way of paying attention. And so as we think about what we pick up on that journey to narrative and what we leave behind, you mentioned very accurately, you know, women can't be preachers, you know, in a certain narrativized reading. But also we don't, we're not sticklers in most communities for head coverings. Also, you know, a lot of times we're going to go and we're going to have shrimp cocktails, you know, at brunch or what have you. We're leaving behind a lot of what is very clearly and plainly said in the text because we have created a narrative and a narrative always simplifies the details. I don't know if that's helpful in advancing your thoughts, but that really is kind of what I was getting from what you were saying. But I'm just delighted that you are finding so much resonance in that chapter around your own experience and your own thought.
[00:25:20] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you so much for that.
The Bibleist platform was, was a trickier chapter for me.
I'm like, I get what you're saying and I'm grateful for this conversation because, because I had a few notes where on the margins I just said, say more, say more. So, so David, now I'm saying say more.
The Bible is platform. A couple of the notes I have on here. Platforms mediate, they encourage rearrangement. And, and I want to, I want to, to play with that idea a little bit because the word picture that you gave that stood in my mind and I think is helping me kind of process that Bibleist platform is two GMC trucks.
I'm talking to you from Texas.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: I grew up in southern Oklahoma. Oklahoma, I affectionately call diet Texas. It's just like not quite full flavor, but we're still, we're still there.
And I grew up in a small town in Southern Oklahoma where we just call them souped up. Right. Souped up. Trucks were the thing. And you'd kind of look at some of them, and some. You're like, you can't even crawl into that. Like, there's no way that you're doing that. But that was. That was the gig.
And then the question was, if you look at kind of one that rolls off the factory floor and then another one that has had some modifications, a lift kit added, when you look at those two trucks, there really isn't an answer to which one of them is, quote, the real truck.
They're both. They're both. The real.
The real truck. They're both real trucks. And in your example, they're both GMCs. You know, they're both a real truck.
But these platforms have. There's been some modification to this platform of the truck.
So I have thrown out just some weird. I feel like I'm just kind of like these crumbs and these pieces.
But talk about that a little bit more holistically, if you would. The Bible as platform.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: Sure.
That was probably the trickiest chapter for me to write from a technical standpoint, for I think exactly the reasons that you're saying, in a similar fashion to trying to make a book visible. But we are trained with a particular type of attention to have the book. As soon as the book is working like it should, it is supposed to become invisible in our hands. Platforms are even more so that when we go on and. And platform is again, such a large term. So let's give kind of three handles for your listeners. A platform is literally an orange crate that you put in the middle of a public square, and you stand on it. So you're a little raised up above the crowd, and the crowd can hear you. That's one kind of platform. A platform is also. When you log into Facebook, Facebook will tell you they are not a publisher. They are simply curating the content that everybody creates. They are the platform upon which the happens. So that's another type of platform, a way of kind of being interactive in public without some of the legal consequences.
But we can also talk a platform. Talk about a platform as a kind of frame upon which people make modifications. So you mentioned the GMC truck. Also in my mind was a type of rifle known as the AR15, originally made by Armalite, but now, you know, Colt and everyone else has taken this. And you can ask yourself from a legal standpoint and from a philosophical standpoint point, what is the essence of the AR15 or what is the essence of the GMC truck?
And as soon as you start asking that very concrete material Question, things get really weird because what is the AR15 is a very small part of what we would consider to be that entire rifle. It is basically the, the grip that you hold and a certain, a certain metal casing that holds a mechanism. But everything else on that is user chosen and user modified. You can choose a long barrel, you can choose a short barrel, you can choose a collapsible stock, you can choose a folding stock, you can choose a rigid stock, you can add different types of scopes, you can add different type. You can trick out an AR15 and you can trick out a GMC truck as widely and as wildly as your imagination will allow. And then you are faced with the question, when does it stop being a truck? When does it stop being a rifle? And the answer is, it never does.
But, you know, in the same way that you can look at a Chihuahua and you can look at a Rottweiler and you can look at a Great Dane and you can say, how are these all dogs? They don't look the same way.
You can look at a GMC truck that's been jacked up three stories high, and you can look at a GMC truck coming right off of the, the, the assembly line. Or you can look at an AR15 that is, you know, tricked out one way by one user and another way by another user. And you. What's the commonality here? What's the essence?
And the essence, when we find the essence, we found the platform because the platform is what allows for them to be that flexible while still allowing us to say, it's a truck, it's a dog, it's a rifle. So I don't know if that begins to help, but, like, that was really, like. Even now, you know, it's taken me like 15 sentences to answer your question. And what I had to fight when I was sort of revising the book was to have the platform chapter not become the entire book, because it kind of wants to be like an entire philosophical exploration on its own. But. But I had to be very judicious. But in the process, a lot got left on the cutting room floor. And so I, I hear clearly that it may have been a frustrating chapter for you to read. I will simply, in solidarity, say it was a very frustrating chapter for me to write. And so your, Your experience is mirroring my experience, reader to author, and I'm at least grateful for that.
[00:31:42] Speaker A: Well, no, that's good. I, I wasn't. I didn't feel frustrated as much as I just felt like, I don't know that My, it was like my, my muscles in my imagination. I was like, I'm having. I'm having a hard time kind of grasping some of this. So let's. But let's talk about how the Bible is representative in that space. I, if I'm not mistaken, and I could be, this is the chapter where you bring in Jefferson, Jefferson's Bible. Yeah. And that was totally helpful for me, as I kind of imagine not just that particular instance that Jefferson did, which, anyway, the more I read on Jefferson, that's a whole other situation, but that that particular text of Jefferson's helped me. And I was able to kind of extrapolate and say, oh, I can totally see how this is happening, not just even in some of those physical forms like with Jefferson, but even, you know, from the pulpit or even how we're talking about these things socially or, you know, things like that. So that was helpful for me in my imagination in this platform chapter.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Well, and if I may flesh that out a little bit. So you're discussing Thomas Jefferson, I think the fourth president of the United States, maybe the third.
He bought a couple of. Of New Testaments and he went at them with a razor blade and he cut out all of the mystic and what he considered to be the mythical parts. And he just left the moral teachings. And he assembled using sort of, you know, paste. He pasted these clippings into a notebook, and this became a kind of personal meditation for him, which he referred to as the Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Nazareth.
And so he created a distillation with a razor blade of what he thought the real Bible was.
What's important about. To know about Jefferson? Two. Two aspects here. One, that Jefferson never intended this for publication. This was just for personal use. And second, as he was contemplating the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth, he and his family owned hundreds of human beings. And upon his death, they were not released, but instead they stayed in servitude. And at least some of those beings were the mothers of his children.
But when you're in a relationship of master slave, it's hard to think that that was a consensual sexual relationship. So there's a lot of layers here. As he's contemplating these lofty moral matters, he is engaged in this real problem. And so I definitely talk about the life and morals of Jesus of Nazareth, but there's also another aspect of this, and that is a Bible that was used for mass distribution and publication, known colloquially as the Slaver's Bible, which was again, a Bible that was intended to be given to literate slaves or literate people who were enslaved for, for their religious edification. But it was the Old and New Testament with all of the liberatory aspects removed.
So it was simply slaves, obey your masters, but none go down to Egypt land and let my people go.
And so we have here these both examples of cuttings, you know, for, for Jefferson, we have the Bible that he, that he cut down personally to make his personal meditative Bible. But we also have this other object or these objects because they were mass produced and they were distributed widely that were designed to create a certain type of reading experience, probably definitely in enslaved people, but also to some extent in those that were involved in the violence and maintaining the violence of the slave trade. And so we have to ask ourselves in a similar fashion to the GMC truck and to the AR15, when does this stop being a Bible?
When you cut out the liberatory aspects. Can you still say that it's a Bible? Well, the publishers of the slaver's Bible absolutely claimed that it was, was.
And if we, if we say, well, taking stuff out means that it no longer actually functions as a Bible, then it, we also have to push in the opposite direction. Protestants who love their 66 book Bible and are not using the 73 book Bible of the Catholics or the 78 book Bible or the 81 book Bible of the, of the various orthodox traditions. We can then ask, well, you've cut things out too. And so again, you have to ask, ask when does it cease to be a Bible? Or if all of these different aspects are on the platform of a Bible, then they all are legitimate Bibles. And so then we can't simply say, well, the Bible says this or the Bible says that, because we have examples of iterations on the platform that push in vastly different directions. We have, if you will, the Chihuahua to the Great Dane in terms of possibilities here.
[00:36:49] Speaker A: Gosh. Oh my gosh. My mind is going in a hundred different places and I'm not gonna say most of them out loud because sometimes talking to think gets me into a little bit of trouble. But you know, thinking about one of the things that came to my mind is, is preference.
You know, I drive a gmc. I drive a big GMC SUV because I have a big family and multiple dogs and all of this. And there is nothing lift kit ish about it. It is, you know, 10 years old and it gets us where we need to go.
But that would be my preference over a brand new one that wouldn't be able to fit in the garage because of its height, you know, as an example. But just thinking about how this is seemingly innocent when we're talking about things like this, like a. Like a truck. Well, it's just preference.
But then. And this is where I shouldn't say this, but. But here I am. I'm gonna say it. But then I thought, ah, yeah, but there's also a functionality to those things as well.
When. When my. One of my teenagers was a preschooler, we took him to a monster truck thing for his birthday. We'll never do it again. Again. We couldn't hear when we left. But, you know, I'm like, those trucks have functionality that nothing that I've ever driven has. And I don't like talking about the Bible as something that is functional. But I think this is part of the conversation, if I'm hearing you, is that this Bible that was written by slaveholders had a functionality to.
It was publicized and it had a function to keep enslaved people or to attempt to keep enslaved people submissive. And, you know, all of these things. And it just. It just feels wild to think about that and then ask the question that you asked, which is, but when does it cease? When does it stop being a Bible? Even when its function seems like something that is so antithetical to everything we would say the Bible teaches is.
The publishers of that and the people who were distributing it did not balk at the fact that for them, yeah, this was still a Bible. It was probably. I'm guessing here, I'm making things up in my mind, but one of my kids came home the other day. Someone was handing them out again. We live in Texas, right? So somebody at the. Close to the middle school, I guess, was passing out these little Bibles, and he had never seen one that was Psalms, Proverbs, Proverbs and the New Testament, you know, but, yeah, it's the same kind of thing, right? It's like. Well, it's. I said, yeah, that's. That's a Bible. It's not the whole Bible. But they're passing it out to you, and they're saying, here's a little Bible for your locker. And it's. It's just part of the Protestant again canon here. Psalms, Proverbs, and. And the New Testament. But they're not claiming this is ceasing to become a Bible. They're saying, here's a Bible for.
So I said I wasn't gonna say all of that, but, man, David, the functionality is disturbing. That piece that I didn't even want to go through, in my mind is disturbing.
[00:40:10] Speaker B: Even more so if you open up the first couple of pages of that little Gideon pocket Bible, and I'm calling it a pocket Bible, I've got three over there on my bookshelf. If you open up the first couple of pages or the back couple of pages, it instructs you how to read it. If you're feeling lonely, go to these passages.
If you're feeling lost or you don't know what next career move is, go to these passages. If you're, if you're feeling, you know, if you're feeling like doing harm to yourself, go to these passages. If you're feeling lust, go to these passages. So it, even within that thinning down, it instructs you already in terms of how to engage with it and think about a study Bible. A study Bible is that. But on a kind of grander scale where it's like, oh, you have a question, and we're going to answer that question in the footnotes. My favorite example of that, of course, is the Stewardship Study Bible, which is endorsed by Dave Ramsey and other evangelical financial luminaries. But if you go to Acts 4 and 5, where we learn that the earliest Christians were communists and were sharing all of their goods in common and that no one had want among any of them, and in fact, to the level where if anybody tried to cheat that system of communism, they were literally struck dead by lightning. Hello, Ananias and Sephora. You go to the footnote in the Stewardship Bible and it says, says this form of living was not communism because. And it, it explains away the plain sense of Acts 4 and 5, which again, that's. That is a book telling you how
[00:41:37] Speaker A: to read it, right? It's funny, I was, I was trying to be in my, in my next thought. And so I was, I was coming and I was going to flip through some of the, the pages on the community chapter to remind myself of something. And then I flipped immediately to the page in the platform chapter where my annotation. You're talking about that very thing. And I just put. Yep. And I put Ryrie example because in college I had a, I had a Ryrie Study Bible. And I vividly remember probably, oh my gosh, so do my peers. Poor, poor people that were just with me in those moments where it was like, well, I don't know what is, what does Charles Ryrie have to say about it? You know, we're flipping through and, and, and seeing that because we're searching for commentary, we're doing. But anyway, Inside those gilded, those gilded pages there, which
[00:42:24] Speaker B: as you're looking for that next piece, let me simply add a coda to this and say this really became clear to me again when I was sitting in Walter Bergman's classes in seminary. He would always direct us. If we were reading, for example, the book of Isaiah, he would direct us to the places where the text really got thick and really didn't yield easy answers. And he'd have us live in that difficulty. When I, I got into the wild and I began teaching Bible myself, I tried to do that same thing. And I had the experience again and again of asking or directing students to a really tricky passage and immediately having a hand shoot up with a very simplified answer. And what I realized was they were reading the footnotes. That solved the problem, which I think is the, the, the kind of ryrie example that you're giving.
[00:43:09] Speaker A: Oh yeah, 100%. Okay. I couldn't find it, so, so. But we'll go there anyway.
The Bible as community.
[00:43:19] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:43:21] Speaker A: This was a fun one.
This was one that on that Sunday afternoon I kind of nudged my teenage daughters and I kind of nudged my teenage daughters because we were. And you know, had a little conversation that was a continuing one on the, these relationships that you talk about, these one way relationships that we form with television characters or movie characters. It was actually really interesting.
Gosh, it's been. A few months ago, a couple months ago I had a dear friend visit and we were talking about areas in which our theology has changed and what that has meant for us practically. And I had said, you know, a lot of times they say that these kinds of changes begin with interpersonal relationships. And I said, but for me, interestingly enough, it has been media because I have like fallen in love with characters that kind of represent, you know, these certain. And, and, and she, you know, anyway, so we had this, this conversation, but in that way, that was one of the ways that I, I related to that. But I was talking with my, with my daughters because when you talk about ship, shipping, you know, and fanfics and all that stuff, we watched Stranger Things together that my daughters and my husband and I all watched it together and oh my goodness, the memes, the shipping, the fan, you know, all of that stuff after, you know, after the fact, because my husband and I relate to the game. So we were like, you know, watching it kind of after, after everyone else had seen it. And so, but even when they're saying, oh, you know, there's this one group that ships so and so and so and so And I'm like, no way. You know, but, but it's like, like I know. No, because I have this imaginary one way relationship with this character. I'm like, there's no way he would go for that, you know, and anyway, but it's, and it's fun to kind of talk about, but this is where you, where you start. This chapter as Bible as community just felt so intriguing to me to kind of put my mind in that place again thinking about, about the Bible.
So I kind of want to ask you, like, where did this one come from for you? Like, where was in your mind and what were the things like, societally that you were thinking of when you're talking about Bible as community in this way?
[00:45:41] Speaker B: Well, and just to make sure that your listeners are tracking with us, if you have ever gone to a movie or you've watched a TV show and you find yourself at a certain point weeping because this character on a screen has had a particular type of tragedy befall them, you have established what psychologists call a parasocial relationship.
That character doesn't exist as a being the way that you exist with your family, the way that I exist with my family, the way that I assume that the two of us exist here through, through this media interaction that we're having right now. We're flesh and blood. We have complex lives. A character has no complex life. A character is simply what you see on the page on the screen.
And yet we can form these deep, deep relationships with these characters. A great example is my family was having a really rough day a few years ago and my kids were a little younger. And I picked up a clementine, you know, a little tiny orange fruit out of the bowl and I drew a little angry face on it. And I started.
And we all laughed about the growling clementine because that was kind of how we were all feeling. But what I discovered was when I put it back in the bowl, nobody would eat it.
[00:47:04] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: Because it had a face.
And so eventually the clementine moved from the bowl and it began to sit on top of the refrigerator and it eventually got brown and shriveled and it had what we could consider to be, you know, a pleasant, long life as a clementine not ripped apart and eaten because it had a face. Well, that's a parasocial relationship. We, we tend not to eat things with faces.
And so. Or when we think about the face, it makes it weird to eat the thing. So, so, so then let's think about the Bible or a Bible.
And okay, I am opening this up, up and here is this character named Jesus.
And I can't speak for you and for your religious journey, but my religious journey has been shaped by a very deep personal relationship with this person that I've never met in the flesh, that I only know through stories and I've only interacted with through prayer.
Okay, that's kind of like when I watch a TV and I'm, and I'm weeping at this character. Now I can understand at points that the character on the screen has no further dimension than just what I'm seeing on the screen. But one of the things that we learn when we read the psychologists about parasociality is that sometimes very well meaning people will slip and they will begin to imagine that they have some kind of deeper relationship with that character or with the actor that plays that character.
We've all heard stories of David Letterman and Harrison Ford and Jodie Foster who have had problems with fans, who have decided that somehow this one way relationship is a two way relationship. And so there's always again, a kind of ethic, there's a kind of morality here, here. There's a philosophical dimension to this. And so I'm trying to utilize this real world thing of watching the TV and trying not to fall in love with the actress or the actor that plays the character that I've fallen in love with.
I'm trying to keep those baffles in place, but then I'm trying to pivot and say, okay, then when I read Scripture, are those baffles in place?
What am I doing when I'm imagining somehow and I say, just Jesus loves me. This I know, for the Bible tells me so and so that, I mean, there's a lot of trickiness there.
And to use a phrase from my friend David Dark, I'm trying to slow the tape and I'm trying to really pay attention to the shifts that I want to make very quickly when I say, well, clearly I know that Jesus is real because I've read this story.
[00:49:57] Speaker A: Gosh, it's so weird. Yeah, it's just so weird.
It's just I think that every time Easter comes around.
[00:50:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:07] Speaker A: I'm like, this whole thing is so weird.
And we have, I would say, I mean, we're sitting here talking because to a degree, you and I and probably many of the listeners, we have ordered our lives,
[00:50:20] Speaker B: ordered our lives in terms of vocation, economics. I have given up job promotions or job opportunities because I wanted to pursue a more ministerial or a more sort of service line. Exactly. Because I'm in love with this person that I've never met.
[00:50:35] Speaker A: Yes. We have ordered our lives. It is wild.
[00:50:39] Speaker B: Well, and if I may add to that, you mentioned Easter. I don't know how they do things in your particular congregation, but in my parish, when we get to the Easter Triduum, there's a point where we read the story and the congregation's job is to shout, give us Barabbas. Give us Barabbab Abbas. And so suddenly, we're in the story, and we're characters in this parasocial relationship.
And so we've talked about the kind of political arrangement that reinforces a particular type of identity within at least my parish community.
[00:51:12] Speaker A: And it feels.
We did this. This was the first time I'd participated in something like this this past Easter. And it was so, so hard to say. Yeah, which is the point, I think. Right. But it was so hard to say because of this relationship with a person that I've. I've never met in that way.
Anyway, to take it back to stranger things, like, to tell my kids, I don't ship so and so I ship so and so. They'd be like, nope, never gonna say it. Never gonna do it.
It's harder than. Than that.
It's harder than that.
[00:51:51] Speaker B: But I love that you keep coming back to this, because this adds another dimension to this, and that is we allow ourselves, and this kind of speaks to the narrativization that we talked about earlier. We allow ourselves. When a text is incomplete or doesn't give us every detail, we gladly fill in those details, and there are pushbacks that come from that, and there are possibilities that come from that. So let's think, for example, of Old Testament characters, David and Jonathan.
When we imagine what their relationship was, a whole mess of politics comes out of that. Or David and Bathsheba. When we think about their relationship, a whole mess of political possibilities comes out of that. Well, and so we can fanfic, we can ship certain people, and we can forbid ourselves to ship other people.
[00:52:45] Speaker A: People.
[00:52:45] Speaker B: And in the process, we are saying a lot more about ourselves than we're saying about the text.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: Yes. Yes. Oh, 100%.
Oh, my gosh. I'm looking at the time, and I'm like, we've got to get here.
Bible as accessory.
Excuse me. Bible as accessory.
Believe it or not, Shout out to my visiting friend last month who suggested that we watch the original Devil Wears Prophet, Prada. So I actually knew I had never seen it. I shouldn't even, you know, say that, but I had never seen it. She was gonna go Watch the, the second one. It's just like, why don't we watch this one? So we did watch it with the kids. And this scene that you open up this chapter with blew my mind.
And, and I, I want to let you talk about people who, probably everyone who's listening has seen it, but it's the scene where Meryl Streep's character is talking about the blue sweater that Anne Hathaway's character is wearing, because Anne doesn't get it. Anne's character doesn't get it at all.
What is inside of that.
So I want to let you talk about that a little bit in the context of Bible as accessory, but also to kind of bring us back full circle to where we were talking in the very beginning, which is the Bible becoming an accessory to our, our deeds.
And as I was writing this, you know, it's, it's funny, you're a professor, and it just irritates me to no end that writing helps us understand so much.
So even in my little jotting down of notes, I had things coming into my head that were helping me understand this, this text that in a different way than when I was reading it. And what was in my head was, oh, my gosh, this feels like the, the charge of an accessory to murder.
This person didn't do the thing, but they were in the law's eyes, for an example, an accessory to this deadly crime that had happened. So Bible as accessory. Let's start with, let's start with that Devil Wears product scene, because that was so great.
[00:55:01] Speaker B: So just to recollect, the Anne Hathaway character in Devil Wears Prada is sort of being dismissive of everything that's happening. They're working at a high fashion magazine, and Meryl Streep's character sort of just looks her up and down and picks out one piece, which is the blue sweater that she's wearing. And she says, and she goes through the entire litany of, you know, this particular designer decided that they were going to have a particular type of blue cerulean, and they were going to have an entire sort of season that was around cerulean blue. And eventually that filtered down to the lower level haute designers. And then finally it became part of fast fashion and fast culture. And as a result of this one decision made by this one design house, an entire economy emerges where, you know, know, you know, these multiple businesses are making profits off of using this particular style of blue.
And Meryl Streep's sort of summation is, you think that you just picked up that sweater out of a bargain bin because it looked attractive. But the amount of decisions that went into shaping your ability to simply casually take that sweater, you have no idea how. How vast that is. And. And so we can think about this in terms of, when I make a decision to go out in public, I'm going to accentuate my basic dress in certain ways. Will I wear a coat? Will I wear a tie? There are certain expectations for certain events that are going to have a different sort of level of accessorization than others. But in each of those cases, I think that I have a choice, and I think that I'm making a choice that somehow expresses myself.
Okay, so now let's go and let's sit down in the office of an executive vice president of a Bible publisher, which I have done in my research, and let's ask that Bible publisher executive.
When you are making a Bible that is pink, or you are making a Bible that is identified with a particular type of work, like a fireman's Bible, or when you are making a Bible designed for teens that looks like a teen magazine, why are you doing that and what are you thinking? And the answer is twofold. One, because we want it to sell, because we want it to get into the hands of the right, you know, sort of target population who might not otherwise pick up. And the phrase that they use is a black bonded Bible. Just the. The sort of basic Pew Bible that we're thinking of. They would never be caught dead carrying that. But a teenager might carry something that looks like Vibe magazine or might, or that looks like Seventeen magazine, and that somehow this becomes a way of kind of it being able to get into a person's hands, or if. If you're having a big Easter to do, and you've got a whole outfit and you need a pink or a purple Bible that matches your outfit, they want to have that available for you so that you will make sure that you're picking up that Bible and you are visibly holding that Bible. And so, in one sense, they want to get the Bible into people's hands, but the other dimension of this is they want to make a profit. And every business wants to make a profit. But when you sit down in the executive's office, their rationale for wanting that profit is. And I talk about this a little bit in the conversation with my friend Tom Siselka, who is a wonderful public relations master here in Chicago.
He was involved with Thomas Nelson with something called the Million Bible Challenge, which was literally a Bible made as cheaply as Possible so that you could buy a case of them for a dollar, a Bible.
And the whole conceit of it was buy a case and hand them out as much as possible. But in order to make that economically feasible, that's a lost leader because it cost more than a dollar to make each of those Bibles. They offset that by having all of this array of designer Bibles. So that was their rationale, was they wanted to utilize those who had disposable income and offer Bible as an accessory to their lifestyle so that they could then get these Bibles as cheaply as possible into people's hands so that the Bible would change their lives.
And so that's the mission of why they think about all of this accessorization in terms of like all the different identity Bibles, all the different color Bibles, all the different, the different varieties of Bibles that you can still get no longer at a physical space like Borders or Barnes and Noble, but you can still get on animals, Amazon.
That was the rationale for it. But you've touched on the other piece as well. But right now we're just sticking with the kind of idea of physical accessorization. But I love that you picked up on accessory to murder. And we can pivot there whenever you wish because that really was the piece that unlocked the whole book for me.
[01:00:05] Speaker A: Well, and on that accessory to murder piece. So, yes. So thank you for the physical part. Again, that it's a political arrangement. This book is a political arrangement down to, you know, and Meryl Streep's character talks about that so well. And it connects there.
The part that was helpful, the example and you use, you're speaking my language in this book with a lot of the examples and the metaphors. But one that surprised me because I'm not a video gamer was the Minecraft situation.
And that how that example, how you describe that kind of creeping along where it's like we. This isn't my intent. So I'm talking about the Minecraft thing. I'm going to let you. I'm going to let you elaborate on it, but it's basically, basically in Minecraft there is the ability, which I didn't know this, to enslave villagers, non player, non. Whatever they're called. The ones we kind of joke in our house, just wave at you or whatever.
They can be enslaved inside of Minecraft. But for the most part, people don't find that out. Players of the game don't find that out because they're searching out to enslave villagers for Their gain like this is not the intent, but it ends up being, like, a sin of convenience.
And that's where I'm hoping. Can you. Can you help bridge that gap and then talk about how that analogy helps us understand how the Bible becomes. Can become an accessory to our deeds, to our violence is one of the places that you talk about, but just an accessory to our deeds in general.
[01:02:13] Speaker B: Well, so the example that you're talking about comes from a video essay by a media critic from Canada by the name of Dan Olson, who publishes on YouTube under the name Folding Ideas. And. And the video, I think, has the title something like, oops, I did a Colonialism in Minecraft.
And the whole sort of narrative that he spins out is he and his friends set up a Minecraft server. They were playing, and just by dint of the way that the world unfolded, when they first started the Minecraft geography, it made it very, very difficult to get cats. And they all wanted to have some cats. And so he talks about it, and he says there is a very complex process that you can go through that will allow you to get cats. It involves having, you know, the villages that. So all the places where there were villagers were far away from where their particular encampments were. And so they wanted to kind of build villages closer by because the villages are essential to domesticating the cats.
And so in order to have a village, you need villagers. And he said there's a very complex way to kind of take. And this is getting into Minecraft lore, to take an undead entity and turn it into a living villager. And you kind of have to go down to the underworld and do all this sort of sorcery and everything like that. But eventually you get a villager, and then you have to do that twice at least to begin to build the village and to populate the village within the game. The much simpler, simpler passage to getting villagers in your village is to go to a distant village, force villagers onto a boat, take the boat down the river, and then because they can't get off the boat by themselves, you let them off the boat at your new village, and they go into your village. And he says, this seems an awful lot like chattel slavery, but it got them cats.
And so, you know, as you've pointed out, the whole conceit here wasn't, we want to enslave human being.
We want some nice cats in this game.
But as the mo. It turns out that the most convenient and easy way to get the cats you want is to enslave a whole bunch of non player characters and trap them basically in your village where they can't return to where they grew up. And you can think to yourself, well, they're non player characters, they don't matter.
But then we can ask ourselves in what way does, does the Bible text encourage us? We could ask the Amalekites, encourage us to think of certain populations as non player characters and to think about somehow the violence that is being done against them as deserved or that somehow it is righteous.
You know, God wants this particular group of people to have the land.
Dan Olson wants some cats in Minecraft. And in both cases that becomes the justification for doing tremendous violence against populations that are then defined as not mattering.
And so this opens up the kind of dimension of accessorization to violence, accessorization to murder. That became to me the really interesting philosophical question of the book.
[01:05:27] Speaker A: Well, and just to take even that just for a moment and say, we just got through talking about these parasocial relationships that exist in media where we can feel our emotions, like you, you mentioned, we're weeping if, if this, if this character dies or if this relationship doesn't work out. And so part of me and, and I think about that even as a mother, you know, when I'm talking to my children of like, what are we practicing? You know, like, how are we, you know, and there is an answer to some degrees where, you know, some kid of mine might say, well, mom, is not that deep.
But then you might also say, well, but, but is that it, that deep? You know, as you're saying, like, what are we, what are we practicing in that way? And when you, and when you shift over to the Bible, I mean, we've seen this historically, but we're also seeing this currently.
Yeah, we were again, kind of full circle back to the beginning of this conversation. We talked about the title of we have these places in the Bible. I'm saying, can we like, you know, the royal we like this greater we. Where we're saying this is, this is okay, this is an okay way to treat people, or maybe this is even a preferred way to treat people, or this is a righteous way to treat people, or treating people with this way is, is how we show our integrity and, and that, and that that matters.
I'm thinking right now about how when you talked about the beginning, looking at the Christian nationalism that exists where we are right now, and I recently saw a post from the White House and then a commentary from Ibram Kendi about it with, you know, that was a riff on like an aliens movie having immigrants being lifted up and just, and transported. Even, even as you, even as you just described Minecraft, like being lifted up and transported digitally, you know, this, these images onto the other side of, of a wall, of a border, of a boundary. And while there's no explicit mention of scriptural passages in that text, we have seen Christian leaders.
[01:07:57] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:07:58] Speaker A: Using the Bible as an accessory to this kind of behavior, to this kind of paradigm, this kind of mindset, these kinds of deeds and, and, and defending them in that way. And that's just one, you know, small example, but this is included in the kinds of things that you're talking about. About.
[01:08:21] Speaker B: Well, and I think I want to not lose sight of your listeners here because as we're talking about this, they might say, oh come on, you can't really see all of this.
But just as you're saying, we can literally right now look at American leaders, not just political leaders, but military leaders who are from their platforms to bring back that their elevated places of speaking. They are invoking certain cut down aspects of scriptural texts to play out a narrative that involves political arrangements where certain people are ripped away from their families, are put into situations that can only be described as excremental assault, where they are, are being fed food with worms in it, they are being kept in unsanitary conditions where they're being exposed to disease or they're being denied access to medicine and health care. And then oftentimes they are dumped into a country or into a situation where either they are imprisoned or they have no support system and no means of survival. So instead of the abundant life that Christ promised to us, which is, is what I would love for everyone to get out of the scripture, instead we are seeing these leaders reduce other human beings, bearers of the image of God, to what we might call bare life, to mere survival and somehow using their suffering as a kind of entertainment. And that to me is the unconscionable aspect of this. And as an American citizen, my tax dollars are going to this. So I can't pretend that I'm not implicated. I am an accessory to the violence that my is doing. And I need to find a way to own that and to take responsibility for that. And at my best, that is not simply a political calling, that's a Christian calling. But, but so much of my faith and so much of what I hear in my parish and from my church and from American churches generally is designed to distract me from that fact and to comfort me in my accessorization to this violence. Silence.
[01:10:43] Speaker A: David. I'm enjoying this conversation so much that I looked at the clock and my eyes got really big.
So I was going to say put on your professor hat, but I don't know if this is your professor hat. I'm going to ask you to imagine the professors from my undergrad put on their professor hats, perhaps. And as we close out, I'm in an undergrad classroom right now in my mind, and people are starting to wrestle and they're starting to pack things up because the class period is ending. And as a professor, in addition to reminding us that we have a post that's due on Friday and the midterm is in two weeks, you give us something.
And while you're as you're leaving, think about this before class comes next time. And then those of us who are listening get super frustrated because that thought doesn't leave our head for the full week as intended.
So sometimes I phrase this in a different way of like, what's the question? I didn't ask, you know, that kind of thing. But I'll say, what would you leave us with in these last moments if we were we're about to leave the classroom and, you know, we're going to be just shuffling about throughout the rest of our week before we come back to continue this conversation?
What would you what would you leave us with as students here?
[01:12:01] Speaker B: In the TV show Community, there's a character by the name of Abed Nadiri who understands that he's in a TV show and he keeps talking to everyone else as if he knows that there is somebody who is constantly watching him and he interacts with his life as if he is a character in somebody else's story story, which is very frustrating to all the characters around him because it just seems like he is insane.
How is that different from the way that we think about God and God watching us?
And how is it different from when we kneel down to pray and we imagine that we are talking to someone who is outside the frame of our story?
That is what I would leave you and your listeners with just to chew on. And I'd love to hear what folks, folks think.
[01:12:55] Speaker A: Oh my gosh, David, thank you so much.
Wow, this has been so much fun. Again, the name of the book is the Accessorized Bible by my guest today, David Dalt. I'll put where people can grab a copy of it in the show notes as well as if I can grab all of the things we mentioned, I'll put places where they can grab that, too. People can go watch the jerk if they haven't seen it.
Thank you so much for this conversation, for this book, for these thoughts. This has just been really joyful and fun and challenging in all the best ways. So thank you so much.
[01:13:30] Speaker B: Alexis. It has been such a pleasure to talk with you and I hope that we get a chance to speak again. Thank you.
[01:13:36] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show Notes, Music and podcast production by Seth Buscetti. Be sure to give us a review on itunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast product listening app. You can also visit us@thatmakestotal sense.com.
[01:14:13] Speaker B: Ra.
