Michael Coogan interviewed on God and Sex

MICHAEL COOGAN is interviewed by the Boston Globe about his new book:

Coogan’s new book, “God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says,” is his attempt to bridge these gaps. In it he argues that today’s readers are often unaware of how the Bible was written — it was not, as he writes in the introduction, “delivered by humanity as a complete book, written by God and shrink-wrapped in a shipment from Amazon or available for download on a Kindle.”

In fact, he writes, the current scholarly consensus is that it was written by many authors, mostly men, over the course of 1,000 years or so — a span of time and geography that inevitably leads to questions, inconsistencies, and cultural misunderstanding. Those who take its meaning literally, isolating single passages to guide modern behavior, he argues, do so at their peril.

In “God and Sex,” Coogan attempts to distill what the Bible says about an array of topics related to human sexuality often in the news — abortion, homosexuality, divorce, and the role of women in the church — and to help contemporary readers sort through its meanings.

Coogan spoke to Ideas from his home in Concord.