Michael Iafrate vox victimarum, vox dei

Endorsement of Thom Stark’s “The Human Faces of God”

I am not able to give a full review here of Thom Stark's forthcoming book The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong, but am happily able to provide Thom and his publisher Wipf and Stock with the following endorsement:

More than just the standard retelling of the horrors of the Bible, Stark's "confrontational" method of reading scripture exposes the deadly contradictions of biblical fundamentalism and gives thoughtful Christians a way forward by allowing them to "own" these troubling texts in a new way. Readers will breathe a deep sigh of relief at his suggestion that we can view the "dark side" of the Bible as scripture precisely through our condemnation of the way it too often portrays the character of God and the things that God calls human beings to do to one another. Perhaps most importantly, Stark provides a model for theology that is committed to hearing the voice of the victims of history, especially the victims of our own religious traditions. A powerful book.

You are really going to like this book. Congrats, Thom.