Too much communication in the world of religion is one-way: from clergy to lay persons who, if ever respectfully engaged, would become serious inquirers. The most desirable means of effective engagement is the give-and-take method of eliciting and clarifying questions and then drawing the questioner into the answering process. That, combined with the intellectual rigor of Enlightenment thinking in the formation of beliefs, will go a long way toward making contemporary religion a here-and-now enterprise, thus saving it from hopeless irrelevance. ""Sensitive to the cultural and power dynamics...

Using fresh translations and paraphrases to wrest some measure of relevance and contemporaneity from twenty-four important biblical passages, Harry Cook addresses two important questions: How did ordinary people of first-century CE Palestine read or, better yet, hear these important passages, and how can twenty-first-century English speakers in the western world best appropriate them for instruction, inspiration and understanding?