Description:
With a foreword from Brian McLaren, Who Stole My Bible? shows how the Bible is an inspiring handbook to find your voice for resisting tyranny.
Brief description: Jennifer Butler is committed to amplifying the connection between faith and social justice, has a heart as a community organizer, and is an ordained minister. She is the founding Executive Director of Faith in Public Life (faithinpubliclife.org), which works to change the narrative about the role of faith in politics, wins major policy victories, and empowers religious leaders to fight for the common good. She's the former chair of the White House Council on Faith and Neighborhood Partnerships and was an international human rights advocate. Author of Born Again: The Christian Right Globalized, her writing can be found on Patheos, Sojourners, The Hill, and Religion News Service. She lives in suburban Washington, D.C. Visit RevJenButler.com.
Review Quotes:
Jennifer Butler's Who Stole My Bible? is a revelation. Among the saddest moments in church history were the moments when multiple streams of the church began to distance themselves from the Bible. In the zeal of the scientific age and in response to white supremacy whole church streams wrote off the Bible as defunct, old-hat, rusty, irrelevant, and the problem itself. In Who Stole My Bible?, Butler shows us these pervasive analyses erase the Brown, colonized, resisting skin and flesh of the writers of these ancient texts.
-Lisa Sharon Harper, author of The Very Good Gospel and president and founder of Freedom Road
Who Stole My Bible? is a bold and beautiful call to every Christian to resist empire and manifest the Reign of God on earth. By brilliantly weaving together a liberative exegesis of biblical texts, a thoughtful exposition of current reality (sitz im laben) and a helpful analysis of models of leadership that work, Jennifer Butler creates a practical map for each of us to reclaim scripture-and the Jesus to which it points-as a way to heal our broken world. This is a poignant, prophetic, and practical must-read book for all Christian leaders, clergy and lay.
-Rev. Dr. Jacqueline J. Lewis, senior minister, Middle Collegiate Church
Too often the Bible has been used to defend the indefensible and to justify oppression, inequality, exclusion, and all sorts of ungodly things. In this book, my friend Rev. Jen Butler reclaims the Bible as a blueprint for revolution-a revolution of love and compassion and justice.
-Shane Claiborne, author, activist, and co-founder of Red Letter Christians
Jennifer Butler walks the path of faith with the grit of a soldier, compassion of a first responder, creativity of an artist, and unyielding moral voice of a prophet. This book calls to those bruised by religion to witness the healing waters of reclaimed faith while demanding long time practitioners to preach Jesus through embodied action versus shallow slogans and harsh judgment. This is the book to pass on to the spiritual exile and the overly pious believer; each will find joy and common ground in this beautifully written publication.
-Otis Moss, III, senior pastor, Trinity United Church of Christ