Where did the Bible go? Author finds ‘alternative version of Christianity’ in mega-type churches | RNS

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He was deeply moved by his visit to a federal prison in upstate New York, where, he said, the inmates knew the Bible better than he did.

Times of Ahmad | News Watch |
Source/Credit: Religion News Service / The Charlotte Observer
By Emily McFarlan Miller | September 8, 2016

Kenneth A. Briggs has been on the “Godbeat” for years, as a religion reporter for Newsday, as religion editor at The New York Times and now as a contributor to the National Catholic Reporter.

In that time, the lifelong Methodist has seen the Bible “become a museum exhibit, hallowed as a treasure but enigmatic and untouched,” he writes in his book “The Invisible Bestseller: Searching for the Bible in America.”

And so Briggs set out on a two-year, cross-country journey to investigate the Bible’s disappearance from public life and see where he could find it still. He’s documented that journey in “The Invisible Bestseller,” released this month by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Along the way, he met a homiletics professor who encouraged her students to explore the text by exchanging roles with the characters in biblical accounts, and he came across professors at evangelical colleges surprised by how little their incoming students knew about the Bible. He attended a meeting of Bible promoters in Orlando, Fla., worried nobody was reading their tomes; the academic Society of Biblical Literature convention in Chicago; and a traditional Presbyterian church in Pennsylvania. He was deeply moved by his visit to a federal prison in upstate New York, where, he said, the inmates knew the Bible better than he did.

Briggs spoke with RNS about what he learned. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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