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On Sundays when we're fortunate enough to be let alone early, I take out paper and pencil and use my Bible as a desk.
"Lauren Olamina," Parable of the Talents
In the face of mounting evidence that the resources of the nationand of the Earth-are exhaustible [...] there is manifest difficulty: for our need for beginnings has remained intact while the traditional means of fulfilling that need have lost their efficacy. In its fullest dimensions, the American dream has been a yearning for the inexhaustible, unfulfilled now as never before. A painful, complex, but necessary process of recasting that dream, or perhaps replacing it with individual commitments to community and transnational perspectives on the world, may be what the coming century has to offer-a modus vivendi rather than an absolute beginning.
Terence Martin, Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings
Were the African American experience... to become the center of academic biblical studies it would force a shift [...] [p]erhaps, most significantly, it would cause an interruption in the dominant cultural hermeneutical spin that in so many respects assumes modern European-North American Christian culture as the natural modern reification and rightful interpreter of ancient biblical communities and traditions.
Vincent Wimbush, "Reading Darkness, Reading Scriptures"
The protagonist in Octavia Butler's science fiction novels, Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, Lauren Olamina responds to the "manifest difficulty" of a world desperately fighting to cope with what Terence Martin rightly identifies as exhaustible resources and obsolete dreams. As a fifteen-year-old African-American girl living in the near future of 2020s and 2030s United States of America, Lauren Olamina offers what Vincent Wimbush describes above as an "interruption in the dominant cultural hermeneutical spin," by using her Bible as a desk and writing her own religion. This "interruption" goes beyond the "dominant cultural hermeneutical spin" not only to form an extra-biblical religion but also to formulate theology and religious culture that is compatible with the continuation of a species that constantly endangers its own continuation: human beings.
These novels are part of a growing body of work from AfricanAmerican feminist authors who critique the Bible and challenge a uniformly celebratory acceptance of the text. Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's Outlandish Blues contains an entire section dedicated...