Throughout the Bible, the importance of land cannot be underestimated and it is mentioned over 1,500 times! Wars have been fought over it. It can be defiled, promised, cursed, or blessed. It cries out and it rejoices. The land mirrors its inhabitants and their actions, and we can read it theologically with a variety of lenses: political, geographical, social, and ecological. If that weren’t complicated enough, Jewish and Christian relationships to the land are heavily influenced by our respective experiences living in diaspora and the theologies that each community developed in response to that. On this day, we will explore some of the various Biblical ideas in relation to land as well as how those ideas have developed from then to today.  

Reading Scripture Together
This series of conversational one-day courses explores selected sacred texts in detail to consider the ways they have been interpreted, both in the written word and in art, and on their relevance and meaning to us today.