Reading the Margins: Encounters with the Bible in Literature

The Bible and theology are contested spaces, battlegrounds where participants guard entrenched beliefs against perceived threats. But literature, observes novelist Salman Rushdie, opens the universe. It expands what we perceive and understand, and ultimately what we are. Writers make our world feel larger and more inclusive. When other forces push in the direction of narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism, and war, fiction encourages understanding, sympathy, and identification with others. Reading the Margins invites readers to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds, and to pursue visions of justice and compassion. Whether stories about poverty, empire, war, or the environment, the writers considered raise moral questions and often, in the process--even unwittingly--deepen our understanding of biblical calls for kindness and mercy.

Reading the Margins offers a kind of commentary on biblical ethics. Using Matthew's Beatitudes and sheep and goats parable as an organizing principle, Gilmour argues there is much to learn about Jesus's "peacemakers" and call to feed the hungry from aspirational fiction and poetry.