Godstories: New Narratives from Sacred Texts

Stephen Shoemaker continues the work he began in the sadly out of print work Retelling the Biblical Story (a casualty of the Baptist Holy War)-taking the stories of the primary characters of the Bible and retelling them so a Biblically illiterate church can hear and absorb them. By inviting us to hear the story again he invites us to hear God again. Well worth the money

Shoemaker's book is a much needed addition to all the books about persons in the bible and the nature of the biblical narrative. I am using it in a college course and the great majority of students reading and writing about Shoemaker's book find between it's covers an invitation to the humanity, humor, and grace available in the stories of the Bible. Shoemaker has taken a traditionally Jewish style of storytelling and enriched the resources of all persons for hearing and understanding the stories in the Bible. Sometimes the familiarity with Biblical stories and "how they turn out" keeps people from hearing the call to new ways of being in the world. Shoemaker takes off the layers of "foreignness" and provides a threshold to the Bible for those who have studied it before and those who have not.