Pieces of Ease and Grace (Hardback)

AUD$64.00

The Bible speaks the Word of God, but it speaks it in the hearts of people who live in community and reflect upon Scripture within the full range of their human experiences: love, grace, sin, rejection, forgiveness, and acceptance. Pieces of Ease and Grace mines familiar Biblical stories from the perspective of gay and lesbian people, breaking open God’s acceptance for all. It is powerful reading for all believers.

The Hon Kristina Keneally, CEO Basketball Australia, former Premier of New South Wales, 2009–11.

This is a gentle book. It is not written in a hostile tone, with theological essays targeted at angry adversaries. Instead, it is a calm and loving book that explores a future world in which the Christian churches, in harmony with science and daily experience, reject an unbending insistence on universal, binary sexual identities. Instead, it explores diverse relationships be- tween loving human beings such as nowadays seem to be popping up everywhere before our very eyes. Drawing on biblical analysis and on the famous stories of Ruth and Naomi, David and Jonathan and Mary and Martha and more, it dares to explore the grace and truth of diverse human relationships as they are — not as others demand they must be. And the central message is: gays are not them; they are us.

The Hon Michael Kirby AC CMG, former Justice of the High Court of Australia, 1996–2009.

SKU: 9781922239037 Category:

Description

The previous volume of essays, Five Uneasy Pieces was warmly received. People of faith and spirituality were looking for liberating understandings of the Bible in engagement with their own sexualities and those of friends, family and beyond. The book demonstrated clearly that oppressive uses of selected texts from the Bible were invalid. But more is needed. The obligation upon scriptural scholars is to establish scripture’s hospitable inclusion of those whose sexual identities have been subjected to such oppression. Pieces of Ease and Grace retrieves biblical texts as actively embracing gays and lesbians within the community of faith. Their stories profoundly intersect with those of scripture. Here is a collection of biblical essays on sexuality and welcome that restores the Bible as a book of grace to those whose sexual identities had previously been lost, or condemned, in interpretation.

Additional information

Weight 400 kg