King (Cole) of Pop

Several writers embrace the frequent violence of the Bible with a kind of defiance, often adding a gloss from personal reminiscence. Darcy Steinke links John to the moment when her father, a minister, drove to the home of an elderly suicide with the girl Darcy in the front seat beside him. Charles Frazier links Job to Jonathan Edwards’s scathing sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and to the darker side of his own Appalachian childhood. Francisco Goldman connects the fierceness of Matthew to the savagery of guerrilla warfare in his native Guatemala. Kathleen Norris revels (forgive the pun) in the mythic violence of Revelation, which, she believes, “uncovers the world as it is, and reveals to us our true condition.” It is not that these writers actively defend Biblical brutality. But their distaste for bien pensant agnosticism and unexamined materialism makes them hold aloft those passages which might make good exhibits for a scandalous Brooklyn Museum show called “Biblical Sensation.”

There are sunnier moments. Bono recalls a not-unhappy upbringing in a mixed marriage in Dublin and tells of how “40”—the Psalm-based U2 concert-closer—came to be written. Being in a rock band is, for him, “a different kind of religion” and “not pseudo-religion either.” The redoubtable Fay Weldon is amusing and then touching with the unfeminist Paul of Corinthians in her clutches.

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Pete Hamill

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Several writers embrace the frequent violence of the Bible with a kind of defiance, often adding a gloss from personal reminiscence. Darcy Steinke links John to the moment when her father, a minister, drove to the home of an elderly suicide with the girl Darcy in the front seat beside him. Charles Frazier links Job to Jonathan Edwards’s scathing sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” and to the darker side of his own Appalachian childhood. Francisco Goldman connects the fierceness of Matthew to the savagery of guerrilla warfare in his native Guatemala. Kathleen Norris revels (forgive the pun) in the mythic violence of Revelation, which, she believes, “uncovers the world as it is, and reveals to us our true condition.” It is not that these writers actively defend Biblical brutality. But their distaste for bien pensant agnosticism and unexamined materialism makes them hold aloft those passages which might make good exhibits for a scandalous Brooklyn Museum show called “Biblical Sensation.”

There are sunnier moments. Bono recalls a not-unhappy upbringing in a mixed marriage in Dublin and tells of how “40”—the Psalm-based U2 concert-closer—came to be written. Being in a rock band is, for him, “a different kind of religion” and “not pseudo-religion either.” The redoubtable Fay Weldon is amusing and then touching with the unfeminist Paul of Corinthians in her clutches.