Sr. Macrina Scott
292 pages
St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1999
$13.95
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From the Publisher
Many of us learned Bible stories as children. When we revisit them later in life, we bring a rich treasure of experience that gives new depth and meaning to familiar stories. In Bible Stories Revisited, Scott encourages individuals and groups to read the Bible through the lens of their own life stories to see how God has been at work in their lives. She includes 24 Old Testament stories and offers a reflection on each Scripture based on modern scholarship and her own insights as religious educator and scholar. Bible Stories Revisited provides extraordinary opportunities for spiritual growth.

About the Author
Macrina Scott, O.S.F., a Marycrest Franciscan, is the founder and director of the Catholic Biblical School of the Archdiocese of Denver. She is the author of Picking the “Right” Bible Study Program and is responsible for The Denver Catholic Biblical School Program, as well as numerous articles. She holds a B.A. from Regis College, Denver, and an M.T.S. from Franciscan School of Theology, Berkeley.

Review
Last summer I had the opportunity to return to the Native American ruins at Mesa Verde, Colorado, that I had visited as a young child almost fifty years ago. As I wandered through the ruins, flashbacks of the previous visit mixed with my renewed experience of seeing this place through my adult eyes. Revisiting gave me a new appreciation of something vaguely remembered and an increased appreciation of the struggles that faced the people in this long-vanished culture.

This experience of revisiting is the foundation for the delightful book by Sr. Macrina Scott. Motivated by the increasing numbers of us older Christians over fifty who desire to live a richer spiritual life, she invites us to use the Bible to discover that our life story can be illuminated and enriched by connecting it with the life stories of biblical men and women.

In a series of twenty-four chapters that can be used either for personal reflection or for discussion in a small group of four to eight people, Sr. Macrina invites us to connect the whole spectrum of our life experiences--joy and sorrow, anxiety and fear, loneliness and love, pain, suffering and loss--with similar experiences found in the lives of biblical people in their mature years. Their struggles to live out their relationships with God as well as with one another provide models for our spiritual lives.

The stories of familiar older people, like Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and Moses, David and Solomon, the prophet Jeremiah and the long-suffering Job, are supplemented with other not-so-well known persons like Hagar, Rebekah, Naomi, Hannah, Samuel, Judith and Tobit.

In each chapter, Sr. Macrina unfolds the story with reader-friendly backgrounds, scripture selections, questions that help the reader connect his or her own experience with that of the biblical person, suggestions for further reading from the Bible, and wonderful prayers written by senior citizens who helped to pilot the program when it was first being developed.

This book will be an invaluable resource for anyone who wants to spend some time visiting and revisiting these biblical friends to discover just how active God is and can be in the experiences of everyday life. For those who are looking for a solid biblical foundation for deepening their Christian life, this book is a must.

Reviewed by Steve Mueller, author of The Seeker’s Guide to Reading the Bible: A Catholic View (Loyola Press, 1999) and The Seeker’s Guide to Jesus in the Gospels (Loyola Press, 2001).

Copyright © 1998-2007, Daniel J. Pierson.
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