HOW CATHOLICS ENCOUNTER THE BIBLE

Slip into a pew at a Catholic church almost anywhere in the world on a Sunday morning and you ll likely find something missing the Bible More than five hundred years after the Bible came off the first printing press why does the world s largest biblical religion often not have a printed Bible in the room And if not how is it that the life of Catholics is shaped by the Bible In How Catholics Encounter the Bible award winning biblical scholar and historian Michael Peppard explores the paradoxical role of the Bible for Catholics a book central to their tradition but not usually in the form of a book Biblical ideas and beliefs are more often mediated through diverse modes of storytelling artistic imagination and ritual Peppard begins from the conviction that the Bible for Catholics is not bound with leather book covers but with the liturgical binding of the sign of the cross the wrought metal framing of a stained glass window or the lyrical structures of a God haunted poet He thus de emphasizes the act of private individual reading and instead analyzes distinctively Catholic approaches to the Bible through ritual literature the arts and ethics Primary among these encounters are the Mass and events of the life cycle but Peppard also presents the Cat