Yet I offer a bold rebuttal: none of these definitions is what makes a text sacred. It isn’t about the author or the inspiration. As my mentor, Harvard Divinity School professor Stephanie Paulsell, explains, a text is sacred when a community says that the text is sacred. It’s that simple. When a group of people returns year in, year out, to the same text, wrestling with it by investing their questions, struggles, and joys—that’s what does it. It becomes generative, creating new responses in text, music, movement, film, and story. When we understand a text to be sacred because a community says
...more
