Tabitha

“The world is suited to human enjoyment—”out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sign”—in anticipation of human pleasure, which the Lord presumably shares. This is an extremely elegant detail. The beauty of the trees is noted before the fact that they yield food. It is a rich goodness that the Lord intended

“But rationalizing what God does involves the risk of losing its difficulty and otherness to human expectations. His great forgiveness of the first criminal offends people’s sense of justice, unless they can find a way to read vengefulness into the tale. We are instead to learn that mercy is nearer than justice to Godliness, and that mercy can

“The tide comes in, the tide goes out, and when you are older, around the time when you stop feeling like you’ve crawled into somebody else’s shell, old friends begin to die with appalling regularity.”

— Anne Lamott, Somehow (73)

“Genesis can hardly be said to end. In it certain things are established—the nature of Creation and the spirit in which it was made; the nature of humankind; how in what spirit the Creator God enters into relation with His human creatures. The whole great literature of Scripture, unfolding over centuries, will proceed on the terms established in