Engaging Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible - With Liz Charlotte Grant

·1 hr 11 min·5 clips

Howard Thurman's grandmother vowed never to read the epistles after slaveholders used Paul's words to bludgeon her.

Host Josh Patterson, a former pastor turned brewer, introduces the episode and guest Liz Charlotte Grant, a writer from Aurora, Colorado. Grant shares her background growing up in evangelicalism, attending Wheaton College, and her shift in faith. She explains her book's origin: an accidental focus on Genesis while researching God's voice for a project on the prophets. Grant emphasizes avoiding historical debates and culture-war weaponization of Genesis, instead engaging the text creatively. She describes God's voice in Genesis as alien, like whale song or a poltergeist, inspired by Flannery O'Connor's 'Christ-haunted' idea. Grant values Midrash and eisegesis, citing Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg's work to make the familiar strange. She discusses the discovery of two scribes' handwriting on the Isaiah scroll, highlighting human collaboration in scripture. Grant advocates for listening to marginalized voices, sharing Howard Thurman's grandmother's story of rejecting the epistles after spiritual abuse. She references womanist theologian Dolores Williams' reading of Hagar's story and Wilda Gafney's work on Canaanites. The conversation turns to justice and anger, with Grant and Patterson wrestling with God's wrath and liberation theology. Grant analyzes Abraham's advocacy in Sodom and Gomorrah, contrasting it with his failures toward Sarah and Hagar. She explores the idea of God as a conversation partner, citing a scribal correction where God stands before Abraham. Grant discusses silence and lack in Genesis, linking it to spiritual longing and rabbinic interpretations of the barren matriarchs. The episode concludes with reflections on faith journeys, absence, and Grant's newsletter, The Empathy List.

As heard by us

A thoughtful conversation on reading scripture through voices and lives often pushed to the margins of theological study.

Rethinking Faith frames Liz Charlotte Grant's conversation around what changes when scripture is read through perspectives too often treated as peripheral instead of central to theological reflection.

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Why you'd press play

You can return to Genesis through voices that make familiar scripture feel less settled and more alive after faith has frayed.

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