Reading does not equal understanding

This morning, as I listened to the radio, I heard a woman who said she’d read, in an English version of the Quran, a passage that forbade Muslims from starving or killing their own children. But, she continued, many Muslim children have been killed by their parents or other Muslim adults. Based on this careful analysis, she labeled Islam “a so-called religion” and, therefore, opposed the building of a mosque in her community.

Part of me wants to forget this particular news report. Part of me can’t. I have spent the last hour composing a post that points out passages from Christian and Hebrew scriptures that Christians and Jews sometimes don’t obey to the letter. Or a brief essay on the way history, culture, and even economics, shapes the way some believers interpret their own scripture. Or an angry screed opposed to cherry-picking a handful of passages (or just one) from a holy book and using them (or it) to condemn an entire religion. Maybe something on the power and pointlessness of labeling anything “so-called.”

But, I’ll settle for this. Reading scripture -- our own or someone else’s -- is an important but also dangerous endeavor. To do it well requires knowledge of the original language, issues of translation, history, theology, sociology and anthropology. And that is a minimal list. That’s what reading demands. Understandingrequires curiosity, questions, conversation and a measure of compassion.