By Barbara Brown Taylor.

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I've heard much about Taylor in recent years but had yet to pick up any of her work until I stumbled across this at my local library.

Wow. This is a concise, yet deep, look into the true meaning of such daunting words as sin, damnation, penance and salvation.

Taylor adequately returns the focus of these words the we often ignore to the communal implications of sin. She brings out the insufficiency of the English language to often capture the nuance of the original Greek. It's important to highlight the historical implications.

This book is a great read. Short, you can tackle it in a couple of hours. But you will stop repeatedly to muse on the depth of her insight. To wit:

...it (the language of sin and salvation) really only works with the initiated--that is, with people who have already bought into a worldview that includes a heaven, a hell, and a God who send people one place or another. For people who have never been initiated into that worldview--or who have lived there and left--the language has little power, except perhaps as a deterrent to faith. People hear the guilt coming and they leave the room. They are tired of being judged and threatened by Christians who say "love" and do fear.

Sin often truns out to be whatever a particular group disapproves of, with wide cariation due to class, creed and ethnicity. Selective Bible passages may be offered to support a group's definitions, but there is little awareness that God's values may turn out to be different from their own.