Feminist Poet & Critic Takes Back the Bible

For the Love of God, The Bible as an Open Book, in paperback, by Alicia Suskin Ostriker (Rutgers University Press, 2009).
Alicia Suskin Ostriker’s latest book of essays will make provocative reading for liberals who want to say “Yes, We Can” to taking back the Bible as it seeks to pry a few more fingers from the iron grip conservatives have had on its meaning in the American cultural imagination.
This Bible is not, Ostriker wants us to see, the sole property of those who deny the links between “spirituality and sex, skepticism and joy, Us and Them.” As a woman and a Jew, a poet and literary critic, Ostriker refuses to turn her back on the Bible; ‘this is mine, too’ is the persistent whisper between the lines.
The Hebrew Bible in particular is, for Ostriker, like a river that has shaped the channels of thought and feeling in her mind. But like a river, that force is flowing–dynamic–and quite capable of changing its course over time.
Simple phrases like “the love of God” and “an open book” come to mean…
Read the rest at Religion Dispatches…