As a writer, I should know better than to read Annie Dillard. She always makes me feel inferior. I leave you with this gem from her memoir, An American Childhood:
“The adult members of society adverted to the Bible unreasonably often. What arcana! Why did they spread this scandalous document before our eyes? If they had read it, I thought, they would have hid it. They didn’t recognize the vivid danger that we would, through repeated exposure, catch a case of its wild opposition to their world. Instead, they bade us study great chunks of it, and think about those chunks, and commit them to memory, and ignore them. By dipping us children in the Bible so often, they hoped, I think, to give our lives a serious tint, and to provide us with quaintly magnificent snatches of prayer to produce charms while, say, being mugged for our cash or jewels.”
Wow. Good stuff. Thanks for sharing.