Between then and now, we’ll just have to make do with her wonderful books. All that to say, she had me (and well over half the room) in tears at last April’s Mockingbird NYC conference, and we couldn’t be more excited to have her back in 2014. A children’s guide to Romans would be weird but on stories we probably err on the side of reading too textually, looking too much to fit the pieces together or looking for a meaning-behind-the-meaning rather than letting the images im-press themselves. Her method wouldn’t work for everything, of course. Stripping us of our grown-up pretenses, Sally brings Barth’s “Strange New World” to life. In other words, she enters into the primal wonder of the biblical stories, forcing us out of our shells as theologians or self-conscious hermeneuts we no longer look down on the story, like an accountant feverishly trying to balance the theological books, but up on the story in wonder, in astonishment and admiration. Lloyd-Jones forces us to see the story as a story , and she lends credence to Christ’s claim that you must “become as a little child”, if that claim needed credence in the first place. Recently, Francis Spufford and Christian Wiman have been heroes in revivifying the language of faith, in respective terms of emotional intelligibility and a “new poetics of faith.” To those authors we could add a third, Sally Llody-Jones and her remarkable book The Jesus Storybook Bible, which cuts through much of the dross built on biblical stories by our overexposure to them – the multiplicity of interpretations, or what Walker Percy called “ravening particles” or the “preformed complex of expectations”, that which prevents us from seeing a thing as it is because we expect too much from it, are under a law of Experiencing It, and we often rush into philosophical questions or theological glosses when encountering a biblical text. This principle, in my view, still holds true, and it’s motivated a good deal of what we try to do at Mockingbird. The revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem - new persuasive words for defaced or degraded ones.

One of our favorite quotes comes from Thornton Wilder, the great novelist and playwright, who voiced a vision for the rehabilitation of Christianity in the midst of the Great Depression:

The jesus story book bible