To hear the well-known stories of Daniel as children’s Sunday School lessons is safe and easy—romantic tales about fiery furnaces and lions’ dens from a time long ago in a world far away. What’s not safe and what’s not easy is to pull those stories into our present context and take the imaginative leap to be Daniel in the lion’s den, to be Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, to be Jewish exiles on Babylon’s Main Street. What’s not easy or safe is to ask what it means to be a Christian in a culture that doesn’t want you to actually live according to the Jesus way. In a culture
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