An Altar in the World

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Barbara Brown Taylor. An Altar in the World

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‘I have been reading Barbara Brown Taylor for years now, and nothing she has written has stirred me and inspired me quite as much as An Altar in the World. I am going to keep it close at hand – I know I will be reading it again and again.’

Lauren Winner, author of Girl Meets God and Mudhouse Sabbath

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From many of those same churches I learned how important it was to love God and my neighbor as myself, to share what I had with those who had less, and to stand ready to lay down my life for my friends. I rose to those teachings like a seedling to the sun. They tapped my secret wish to become gallant. They gave me important things to do. If they also drove a wedge between me and the world I so loved, then I do not remember noticing that at the time. What I noticed was that I had found a church, a holy book, and a people of the book who promised me safety from worldly powers I did not even know were there. All I had to do was trust the God of the church more than I trusted the gods of the world, living the kind of in-but-not-of-the-world life that announced where my true allegiance lay.

From that rough start, I went on to learn that there are many different kinds of churches, many different ways to read the Bible, and many different ways that people of faith engage the world. Yet I never entirely escaped the subtle teaching that the world of the flesh is not to be trusted. As lovely, startling, or disturbing as that world may be, it is a world of appearances, not of truth—or so I was taught. Only the Bible contains the real truth, the truth that sets people free.

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