From renowned historian, biographer, and novelist A. N. Wilson comes a deeply personal, literary, and historical exploration of the Bible.
In The Book of the People, A. N. Wilson explores how readers and thinkers have approached the Bible, and how it might be read today. Charting his own relationship with the Bible over a lifetime of writing, Wilson argues that it remains relevant even in a largely secular society, as a philosophical work, a work of literature, and a cultural touchstone that the western world has answered to for nearly two thousand years: Martin Luther King was “reading the Bible” when he started the civil rights movement, as was Michelangelo when he painted the fresco cycles in the Sistine Chapel. Wilson challenges the way fundamentalists—whether believers or nonbelievers—have misused the Bible, either by neglecting and failing to recognize its cultural significance or by using it as a weapon against those with whom they disagree.
Erudite, witty, and accessible, The Book of the People seeks to reclaim the Good Book as our seminal work of literature and a book for the imagination.
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“Wilson, a convert from atheism to Christianity, weaves together meditations on the Bible with personal anecdotes…Wilson soars in describing how we can find this imaginative Bible through George Herbert’s poetry or the work of Simone Weil or Martin Luther King Jr., or in the Hagia Sophia or a Eucharist service. Those who enjoyed Brock and Parker’s Saving Paradise will likely take pleasure in this similarly positive take on viewing the Bible through the lens of the arts.”
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Publishers Weekly