“Faithful Interpretation: Reading the Bible in a Postmodern World” arrived. George Mosse gets a citation, and Eric Idle, and of course Reichsbishop Ludwig Muller. There are perhaps fewer really big words than my headline use of the adjective “megagaltastic” might imply, but the use of commas is creative and permits a parsimonious approach to the use of end-stops, as witness:

If, however, we allow that no lode of meaning lies embedded in our texts, that we (and not texts) sponsor and permit interpretations, that communication and interpretation constitute phenomena of far greater intricacy than the verbal paradigm allows, and that we may honestly and fairly consider the possibility that a given expression may mean several different things — if we yield on these points, the guild of biblical scholars suspects that we will disrupt the exquisite architecture of human communication (and especially, of course, of God’s communication with humanity), rapidly declining into inarticulate grunts and brutality.

Flipping the pages I see that there’s a lot of food for thought in here… an opportunity to re-visit Luce Irigaray’s sense of feminine identity and difference, nuanced linguistics, Julia Kristeva… it’ll be cool. I’ll be glad for reading it. Will I find the power of an authentic universal connection, the wailing of trumpets of spirit and truth? I’ll tell you later.