American - Writer | April 2, 1948 -
My father was a Baptist preacher, and he used to read the King James Bible to me every single morning. He made me memorize it and repeat verses at night before I went to sleep.
Jay Parini
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By the time I went to college, I knew the major passages of the Bible pretty much by heart.
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Then I studied theology in college, and when I was getting a Ph.D. in literature, I took courses in New Testament studies and studied Greek versions of the Gospels.
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One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.
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In a sense, I wrote the book about Jesus that I wanted to read.
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I think that the practice of religion allows one to discover emotional and psychological truth of a kind not available in the secular world.
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I have a mystical bent, and I pursue daily meditations that follow the liturgical calendar - what are called the 'daily offices' of the church.
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The core of the Jesus message is what has made him relevant for twenty centuries.
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Each year in early spring, during the season of Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday and concludes on Easter, a plenitude of books, magazine articles, and television shows about Jesus appear.
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Jesus remains the most influential person in history, one who has inspired untold followers for millennia.
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Whether we're looking at the burial box of St. James, a fragment of the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, or some bones supposedly belonging to John the Baptist, there is always excitement and distrust, faith and doubt.
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Even among those who have no special allegiance to a particular branch of Christianity, there are plenty of seekers as well as agnostics and atheists who harbor a certain curiosity about Jesus and his story.
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