Quotes about Interpretation

The point of the Abraham-and-Isaac story isn't that you should sacrifice your kid but that you can leave behind any notion of a god who demands that you sacrifice your kid.

What's the Best Question to Ask When You're Reading the Bible? Why did people find this important to write down?...Why did people write this down? What was going on in their world that this was important to them? Why did they feel the need to put words to this? Start with that question. Start with those questions. And see what happens.

You dance with the Bible, but you also interrogate it. You challenge it, question it, poke it, probe it. You let it get under your skin. We read it, and we let it read us, and then we turn the gem, again, and again, and again, seeing something new over and over and over again . . .

The Bible is a library of books reflecting how human beings have understood the divine.

right isn't even the best way to think about the Bible. How about dancing? You dance with it. And to dance, you have to hear its music. And then you move in response to it.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.

Only fanatics — in religion as well as in politics — can find a meaning in someone else's death.

Dharma is that which is enjoined by the holy books, followed by the sages, interpreted by the learned and which appeals to the heart.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me it's the parts that I do understand.

Reality is an interpretation.

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.

When you teach on a familiar text, you're capitalizing on common knowledge. When you teach on an unfamiliar text, you're having to build a bridge of understanding, and we need to do that as well.