Memory, Faith, and Becoming with Liz Charlotte Grant (Episode 16)
Charlotte Donlon talks to Liz Charlotte Grant about her reading and writing life, her book Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible, and the themes of memory, faith, and becoming.
Learn more about Liz Charlotte Grant and her writing and work here.
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Why It Matters: Liz brings a spirit of curiosity and openness to the intersections of faith, doubt, and memory. Her work explores how creative practice and spiritual life shape us, inviting us to trust our own voices amid evolving beliefs
Embrace your own journey, welcome the mysteries of faith and doubt, and notice how memory continues to shape who you are becoming.
>>> Spiritual growth often involves letting go of certainties and making peace with not knowing.
>>> Faith and doubt are both part of the journey of becoming our full selves. And the stories we inherit—whether from scripture, tradition, or family—can be reinterpreted in ways that bring new life.
>>> It’s important to explore the complexities of spiritual autonomy, the importance of questioning, and how collective memory influences our spiritual DNA.
After Listening to This Episode, You’ll Walk Away With:
Encouragement that faith and doubt can be invitations to transformation.
More understanding of how honoring the fullness of our experiences leads us toward greater wholeness.
A desire to consider your own story and how the stories that have companioned you have formed you to be who you are today and who you will become in the future.
Please check out this third mini-season and subscribe on your favorite platform. I’d also appreciate it if you could take a minute to rate the podcast and leave a comment to help others find it. Thanks so much for your support!
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As you listen to this episode, I invite you to reflect on your own memories, both personal and collective. Consider how faith and doubt have shaped your path and how the stories you carry have formed you.
Where do you see glimpses of those who came before you?
How might embracing uncertainty open new doors for growth and connection?
What does it mean to become more of your full self, your whole self, not in spite of memory, faith and doubt, but because of them?
This mini-season is an invitation to lean into the fullness of your human experience, to honor the complexity of your history, and to find more belonging as you continue to become more of who you are through your own memories, faith, and doubt.
About Liz Charlotte Grant:
Liz Charlotte Grant is an award-winning essayist whose work has been published in The Revealer, Sojourners, Brevity, Christian Century, Christianity Today, Hippocampus, and elsewhere. She also writes The Empathy List, a popular newsletter that has been nominated for a Webby two years running. She lives in Colorado.
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From lizcharlotte.com: I’m an award-winning nonfiction writer based in Colorado, USA, where I live with my artist husband, two preteens, and a flock of hens.
My debut nonfiction book is Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible.
Read glow-ups in Publisher’s Weekly and Foreword Review. My book also won an honorable mention in The 2024 Church Press Awards from the Associated Church Press.
I am an online columnist for The Christian Century (the progressive Christian equivalent of Harper’s Magazine).
My essays and op-eds have also been published in outlets such as the Huffington Post, Religion News Service, the Revealer, Hippocampus Magazine, Brevity, Sojourners, Christianity Today, US Catholic, National Catholic Reporter, and elsewhere. (Read a sample of my published works.)
I also write a weekly Christian leftie newsletter called The Empathy List.
My work has been recognized by industry leaders.
My newsletter, the Empathy List, has been nominated for two Webby Awards (best independent newsletter in 2022 and 2023), and in 2023, it was also recognized in the Best of the Church Press Awards. Two of my essays won 3rd place in Dappled Things magazine’s Jacques Maritain Prize for Nonfiction (2019, 2022). A 2024 review about American evangelical “purity culture” icon, Elisabeth Elliot, and her disturbing third marriage went viral.
Episode Transcript:
Charlotte Donlon:
Welcome to All of This & More. I'm so excited to share my conversation with Liz Charlotte Grant, essayist, columnist, and the author of Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible. Liz brings a spirit of curiosity and humility to questions of faith, doubt, and the stories that have shaped us over time. In this episode, we talk about how creative practice and spiritual life are deeply intertwined and how both require patience, openness, and a willingness to be changed. Liz shares how navigating faith, doubt, and mystery have formed her character and deepened her sense of belonging while opening her up to new ways of understanding herself and God. We discussed the role of collective memory, how the stories and legends we inherit become part of our spiritual DNA, influencing our beliefs and questions and capacity for transformation. Liz's reflections on the mysteries of faith and the importance of spiritual autonomy invite us to trust our own voices as we navigate the complexities of becoming more of our full selves.
Welcome All of This & More. I'm Charlotte Donlon and I'm so glad to be with Liz Charlotte Grant. Liz will tell us a little bit about herself and then we will dive into some questions.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I'm happy to be here. Charlotte, I am coming to you from Aurora, Colorado, which is just outside of Denver. I am an author, a writer. I tend to do essays about whatever I want, which somehow I found myself in the very privileged and unique position to be able to do that. I'm a columnist for the Christian Century Magazine, which I describe as a Christian, faith-based tars. Whether or not that's a fair description, you will have to decide by subscribing. And I've written a book called Knock at the Sky, seeking God and Genesis after Losing Faith in the Bible. And yeah, I live in Denver with a husband who I've been married to for about 15 years, two kids and a flock of chickens.
Charlotte Donlon:
Great. Thanks so much for telling those who aren't familiar with you and your work, a little bit about yourself, and I love that description of Christian Century. Perfect. Perfect. Thank you for giving that to me today.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
So welcome.
Charlotte Donlon:
When I meet with writers and authors and have them on all of this and more, I like to start with questions about your writing and reading life. So that's where I want to start. And my first question is, how do writing and reading help you belong to yourself, others, and the world and the divine and to God? If you want to answer that question too.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I love this question so much. So I happen to be married to an artist, he's a visual artist, and we talk about a lot the posture that art making puts you in as a creator, the way that you approach the world, the way that we have learned to approach the world has shifted a lot as we consider our role as artists. And so as we're observing, as we're attentive, as we are seeking and curious, that's such a big part of creative practice, creating space within yourself to be able to receive. It really is. And I know that this is a passion for you as well as Charlotte. It is this kind of spiritual forming practice to be a creative, to be able to spend time in the silence and with yourself and with other people without agenda, but with just real curiosity and empathy. Those are the kind of hallmarks of, I hope, hallmarks of my practice. And I think most creators have that experience as well where they realize, Hey, it's not about me. Instead, it's about the whole world. It's about not even just but animals and beings and created things. And so being able to receive that as gift with wonder, with attention, I think that is what has really formed me and my work as an artist and as a person.
Charlotte Donlon:
I feel like everything you just said could also be said about the spiritual life. So I think that's one reason we get along is because there is that deep understanding of the connections and parallels and interweavings, if that's a word, of the creative life and the spiritual life. Yeah,Amen to all of that.
My next question is how has your creative practice and creative work, and not just writing but all of your creative explorations, how have those formed you over the years to help you be more of who you were designed to be?
Liz Charlotte Grant:
The thing that is coming to mind right now as you ask that question is related to this idea of waiting and humility. I'm currently waiting on a couple of projects in the background and finding out if those will become reality or not, just in my own mind or in my own hard drive, but beyond that. So I'm waiting to see if those are going to become reality. And as I do that, it does require this kind of open handedness to my own life. I wrote a memoir that never got published and it was about a disability that kind of came out of the blue for me. And that was a just wrenching process to try to pitch that book and have it go nowhere over kind of two years of pitching with an agent and to all the publishers, everyone. And to not have that go anywhere and to set that book aside and say, I'm going to write something else.
I'm not a person who enjoys having to be patient. I dunno if anybody really enjoys it, but I am a classic overachiever type A student. I'm really more of a type B person, but when it comes to my work, I am just a high achiever, ambitious. I want to make good things and I want to make them well, and I can move quickly and ask other people to do that too. And that has not been how my authorial life has worked out. And so that has required something of me releasing expectation on myself and on other people and on my work, allowing myself the space to grow. Part of it is that even growing in craft takes so much time and there's really no shortcut for it. I often tell this to new writers, the chance to be around new writers every so often and just love the opportunity to just tell them the only way to improve is to write, to write and to write and to do it wrong, and then to save those wrong kind of wanderings in an extra folder and hopefully come back to them.
But to get out your million words or whatever Ira glass talks about before you achieve mastery. And I think just having the patience with yourself and with the process, it has grown me a lot. I would say my character, my willingness to be humbled, to be patient, to move more slowly in the world. That has all been developed in the course of writing and not just writing, but publishing. Both of those are set up as slow processes. There's no rushing either of 'em. If you've ever tried to go against your publisher and push for an earlier pub date or something, good luck. That is a slow moving titanic glacial machine, and you're not going to move that quickly. So it's just a humbling process. I think that's probably, that's really what comes to mind with my current state of mind. But I think either are plenty of other ways, but that patience and humility.
Charlotte Donlon:
So this has formed you primarily through the writing life and publishing life, but have you seen it carry over into other areas of life?
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Yeah, the relational connection between learning patience and publishing and writing and learning patience and relationship with other people. I married to a man who is a visual artist. He's also just a slow, methodical thinker and the way that he moves through the world. We got married and we're evangelical Christians, just really, we might've been considered slightly edgy, but we were evangelicals. And over time we have shifted. I have shifted into the mainline and he has shifted toward not wanting to go to church anymore, which is a challenge for me. And so one of the things that we together have had to work on is just making space for each other, creating openness in our own marriage to say we don't have to be at the same place at the same time. We can be patient with each other in our own processes, which are different because we're different people and we have different experiences that have formed us, et cetera. So it's been fascinating to see those opportunities to be patient come up so frequently. Even as I learn this in other areas of life and my work in particular, I think relationally, I have plenty of opportunities to practice the same thing and say, I might not be right about this. I'm changing my mind, or I am reserving judgment and just saying, I don't really know where this is going, but it's okay. I can live in this medium in between place. I will be okay.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. I'm sure a lot of people can relate to all of the multiple opportunities to be patient and waiting and how we can receive things from that and how it's also kind of awful sometimes too. I have one more question before we move into questions about the book. So right now, while you're waiting and trying to be patient and the world is not helping with everything around us, what art is comforting you and helping you belong to yourself and others in the world in ways that feel safe and good? And by art, I mean all genres and forms of high art, low art, all the in-between art,
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I appreciate this question because my temptation is to tell you impressive works that I'm reading, but in reality, I have comfort, entire comfort genres that I read. So I've been currently working my way through on audiobook, the Amelia Peabody series, which is, I can't even tell you the name of the author. I think it's Elizabeth, I'll have to tell you can put it in the notes, I'll put it in the show notes, whatever. But she has created this adventuring feminist archeologist character who goes around Egypt. She's an Egyptologist, in fact, in the, I want to say late 19th century. And that was the heyday of archeology, really. They were going nuts down there for good and ill. And so there's a lot of discussion of those kinds of things, but it is, let's be honest, it's not literature in the classics. I wouldn't be like, yeah, I'm going to make my nonfiction students read this. Or even fiction students, these are fictional, they have been so comforting to connect to these characters and to archeology is an interest of mine. But I have absolutely no expertise or reason to know anything about it really except just interest. And so it's been fun to cosplay in her shoes for a bit.
And then other than that, I do, I watch a lot of tv. I listen to podcasts. I'm just constantly listening and stories are animating my daily life. And so I just finished a book Metropolis, which is fiction also, and it's about a RoboCup kind of situation, which was a lot of fun, an anarchy in Metropolis, AKA in New York City. And then everybody was completely obsessed with severance. I read There's an extra novel to go with the TV series that I was on the Reddit boards.
Charlotte Donlon:
You did that.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I did it, yeah. I love the Deep Rabbit trail. If I can get down there, it's just so much fun to lose yourself in something like that. And as, I dunno if I mentioned, I often write about politics, so I am very connected to what is happening. And so it helps to have something so disconnected, pure joy and fun. It's not doing much in the world except it's comfort, it's joyful, it's restful for me. And so I have had to give myself permission. You know what you like. It's okay. You can be a weirdo and go down your little path. And that feeds the art in other ways.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yes, yes. Well, and I'm all about having joy from wherever we can get it right now from any kind of TV shows, art, films, whatever. It's a necessity. It's a good thing.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
It absolutely is.
Charlotte Donlon:
And thank you for being honest with me and not trying to say something that's not true or just telling me the literary parts that sound good,
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Which I read those too, but that's not what I'm spending most of my time on. You know what I mean? Yes,
Charlotte Donlon:
Definitely.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Yes.
Charlotte Donlon:
So let's talk about Knock at the sky now, and before I ask a few questions, I'd love for you to
share a bit about the book and how it came to be.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Yeah, this was a sort of weird one for me because I'm not a biblical scholar and this book is about the book of Genesis, like the book of Origins in the Christian Bible. Really it's the Hebrew Bible. I'm coming at it from a progressive Christian lens, Christian mainline. But from the experience with this book as an evangelical Christian where we read the book as a literal history in some ways of God in the world and how the world was made, and it's like our anti-evolution text somehow doesn't make a lot of sense actually when you get into it and go, this isn't actually telling us how the processes worked here. But I think I've gone through my own sort of evolution of faith over the years as I've alluded to. And I think I was curious about the story. I wanted to go back to the origin story.
I think I feel pretty hungry for myth and story and narrative that can make sense of my life. And particularly in this moment when we're thinking about we live in a time of such dramatic technological advancement, our ability to live has increased by years and years from let's say the medieval times, just the way that we have been able to prolong our lives, to prolong comfort in our lives, to create our environment. All of that has increased so rapidly, so quickly within the past a hundred years that is unique in the scope of history. And so I think that does engender a rootlessness where we feel like, where do we come from? Are we actually connected to the ground? And in some cases people will say no. There are plenty of Christians who will say, no, we're not. We're connected to heaven, we're transitory on this earth despite the theology that basically says this is heaven.
God may remake things, but this is the place, there's no other place. And so I just was very curious about the roots and the origins and wanted to go back to that idea. Initially I'd set out to write about the prophets, the Hebrew prophets and the weirdest stories about the prophets, but just found myself asking question about the voice of God and where the voice comes from and how the voice works because of course the voice is what animates the prophets. So I started going backwards and stumbled into this, where's the first time the voice appears literally at the beginning of the Bible. And so then you kind of have to deal with all the other stuff too. So I trapped myself into this situation where I had to write about Abraham, which I didn't want to do, but it ended up being a really fruitful experience for me. I think writing about this strange book of origins, which some parts of are 4,000 years old. So I got to write about an ancestral text, spiritual text, and provide literary criticism on it and just go from there.
Charlotte Donlon:
And you did a beautiful job. I thank you. Would like to read about every book in the Bible, the way I read about Genesis in this book. No pressure, but it's just so much more interesting to me at this point in my life. I've read Genesis enough, I am not saying Skip genesis and read this. Instead I'm saying, please read this.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I am, I am.
Charlotte Donlon:
It's so rich and it's so generative to be curious and to open up new ideas about what was really happening and what was going on when this was being written and by those who wrote it and that sort of thing. So one thing I'm interested in is what you discovered about yourself through writing it and publishing it, and even speaking about it even up till today. What have you discovered that you didn't know about yourself before you started writing this book?
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I think I realized I'm more of an anarchist heretic, like a Christian anarchist than I thought. I was writing about the patriarchal family, the family that started faith, let's say the first people to encounter God. I did great and just had so much fun writing about the sort of pre-history characters, Adam and Eve, Noah, what a weirdo, Enoch and encountering some of those characters that are just, there's no way we can figure out the difference between myth and history and those stories and those characters. And that is fun to me. That is just play. And then of course Genesis hits this sort of middle, there's three kind of acts in Genesis, and I just write about the first two because personally I find Joseph to be really boring and I don't want to write about. I was like, that's been done. Really all of it's been done.
But I just wanted to focus on the first two acts and the second act of Genesis is the story of this one family, Abraham and Isaac and the women, Sarah and Hagar and Ishmael. And that is a very dysfunctional family. I come from a dysfunctional family. It was challenging to write about. It was really challenging, especially thinking about the way that this family dynamic has perpetuated itself across centuries. This idea of patriarchy being passed down, women being classed as secondary, if that under the heel of men and in particular the story of Hagar, the enslaved woman in the household of Abraham and Sarah, and the way that she is forced into surrogacy and then is kicked out of the family several times. That was very difficult to write about for me. And so I end up spending a lot of time on that story because it was so difficult. But I think one of the things that I learned about myself is really just how anti-institutional I am because so much about that marriage between Sarah and Abraham and this founding family has been institutionalized. It represents the first kind of institution of Christian faith and the way that it is then institutionalized across rabbinic history and then across Christian history.
I feel so allergic to all of it. And so that comes across I think in how I write about the family. And I have found that a lot of people get stuck at that part of the book when they start to, the first part of the book feels really exciting, and then they start to feel like the heaviness of this family. And I got really stuck in the middle personally writing the book because I struggled so much with these dynamics. And it was really fascinating to push through and be like, what does it look like to find an imaginative center here to find some mystery and interest and even in an area, a story that is so challenging to me. And so I end up focusing a lot on Hagar and the way that liberation theologians read Hagar, especially womanist theologians. And that for me was so generative and beautiful to say, I am submitting my reading of this text to these other men and women of color who have experienced slavery in their histories and their family histories, and I am going to submit my own reading of this text to theirs. That felt really healing, I think, for me, but definitely did encourage my anarchist tendencies.
Charlotte Donlon:
Well, I mean that's a good thing, a good thing to know about yourself that you're more of an anarchist than you thought previously. One thing I'm interested in as you speak about this is the role of collective memory and how that forms us and shapes us in various areas of life. And there's another, I think in chapter six, you have some legends about Abram that you share. How do the stories that we hear and we know get lodged in ourselves and affect us? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Okay, let me pull up chapter six actually real quick, just so I make sure I address it directly. In chapter six, I talk about Abram hearing the voice of God and leaving and why I really wrestle with the question of why would someone believe a voice from heaven? Why does that matter? And there's a lot. One of the things that I try to do in this book is spend a lot of time with rabbinic commentary on these books, including rabbinic legend. So there's a lot of legend in the Jewish and your Jewish listeners. They know this is not new. I'm not doing something new here. But there's so much written around the words of the Bible, there's a lot of white space, there's a lot of unknown. And the Jewish people do a really good job of creating midrashic accounts that surround these stories and provide a deeper understanding of the motivations for the characters and also give a sense of why these things matter.
In our time, I found it so generative to spend time with these stories, even though many of them are just myths themselves and made up around, one of the myths you're talking about is this story of Abraham having heard God's voice before he hears the call of God to leave his home. And that was so fascinating to me to say the reason that Abraham listened to God and left his homeland was because he'd already been communing with God. He'd already been talking to God. And that is just such a different read on this story than I had heard before. It really gives a very different inflection to God and Abraham's relationship than I had seen in the past. And so yeah, I think it makes a difference. These stories that we imbibe, they really shape the family narrative the way that we move forward. I tell a story in the book about my daughter's birth, I think it's actually in this chapter too, where she actually heard our voices and stopped crying because she already knew our speech.
Because when she had been in my body, she had been already learning our speech. Because that is what infants do, that's what fetuses do. It's just wild. They start learning speech before they're even born, and they're able to then recognize the speech of their parents upon their birth. This is just a common probably misconception that parents, I think know this intuitively, but this is a new understanding from science that these fetus's understanding of language begins in the womb, including pronunciation, including the tone of course, the tone of the parents' voices, but also just even the language itself, the unique language that the parents speak. They begin to learn that in the womb. And I think that idea of the stories that we passed down, that's a maternal image that Abraham would've already been talking with God. And the legends don't necessarily tell the story that way, but one of the legends is that Abraham is actually abandoned in a cave because King Nimrod, who is described as this mighty man in Genesis, and then the rabbis decide must be the king of Babylon who has built the Tower of Babel.
And so he's this extra evil character in the Genesis narrative. So the rabbis then say, okay, Abraham lived in that city. His king was Nimrod, and Nimrod has a dream in which he is told that a baby will supplant him, and that baby is Abraham. Of course, we come to understand his mother births him in a cave in the desert and leaves him there to die. And instead the angel Gabriel actually nurses him with his finger. So he starts sucking on Gabriel's finger and milk comes out and it happens to be supercharged milkshake milk because then within 10 days, Abraham is walking and talking through the desert. He runs into his mother, he's reunited. There's all this backstory behind that. But it is this idea of already God and Abraham having this unique and intimate relationship and instead of an anonymous deity from the sky just speaking at a command at this man to change his whole life, instead, it becomes this kind of intimate invitation to Abraham to leave and follow this being that has always been calling him. And that's a very different way to see the story.
Charlotte Donlon:
It really is. And it sort of opens us up. Well, everything's already happening right before we think we're making it happen. So it's sort of like one of the first times the thing was happening before it happened. I love that story and that example and the example of your daughter and when children are born that they already know the shapes of words that we speak as their specific parents. Of course, it's already been happening. And so it just makes me be curious, well, what else is already happening that I think is not happening yet? So thank you for,
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I love thinking about that, the dimensions of time and the way that the spiritual life and the material world interact. Those are mysteries to us. We don't understand that. We would like to imagine that we do, but I think one of the things that was so sweet about sitting these stories is seeing the multi-layered dimensionality that exists within these narratives, many of which maybe there's some truth to them, maybe they're just myth, but they mattered in the course of history. These stories mattered to the people who told them, and they passed them down over time. And again, that idea of memory and the way that these stories influence the way we live, all of that is baked into this idea of the Bible continuing to have something to offer, but also Abraham hearing from God. And it just changes us. Stories change us. I know you believe that as much as I do.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd love to hear a bit from your book that you wrote because you needed to read it, and maybe now that's changing others because now we get to read it.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I think I needed to hear somebody say that they could be wrong about God. So I'm going to read you this. I admit I fear being wrong about God. What if I've received God with confusion instead of clarity? My native evangelicalism values certainty like the scientists of the Enlightenment. We prefer to quantify, measure, sift, and bottle. We value argumentation and decisiveness. We dismiss doubt and paradox. If we could catch God in a net, ping God to aboard, to collect dust and then study God from every angle, I suspect we would do it yet beginning to suspect that the hike toward God resists a plan. Does any one of us contain the map of spirituality? Wandering may be inevitable. Yes,
Charlotte Donlon:
Unfortunately. Sometimes. Well, fortunately and unfortunately, it's like it's the thing we don't want and then we do it. We wander, we wait, we twist and turn, and it ended up being what we needed. So yeah, it is full of nuance and paradox and just being present to what's unfolding. Maybe that's it. It's not so much about having it all figured out, but being present to what we notice in the moment.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Absolutely. Yeah.
Charlotte Donlon:
I'd love to hear one more except from your book, since you mentioned your daughter's birth. Will you read the passage where that story shows up?
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Sure. Okay, great. The inner ear matures in a fetus at 16 weeks gestation. From that point, babies respond to their own personal soundscapes. They leap and pummel their mother's insides at surprise noises or ordinary speech bumps and burps. Even with organs and amniotic fluid, insulating external sound waves, a fetus can perceive low frequencies. Her mother's muffled speech makes up the background of her days. The mother is already preparing her offspring to communicate with her. And the baby too is already in training, noticing the inflections of her mother's pronunciation by osmosis. I first understood this mystery of early recognition at my daughter's birth when she fell into my husband's open palms, she spluttered, coughed, and then wailed, furious at the light, the cold, the open air. It's okay, my husband and I could baby my baby. You're okay. And the light switching on the child went still. She opened her eyes and searched. She found my eyes and stared then turned and looked into her father's eyes back and forth. Her eyes traveled between our faces. Time slowed, then stopped. As we stared into the eyes of this foreigner, this child who recognized us by our voices, our presence meant safety to her because she already knew us. We had met before.
Charlotte Donlon:
Beautiful. Thank you. Is there anything you'd like to share about the book before we wrap up?
Liz Charlotte Grant:
I think whenever I have told people I'm writing about Genesis, it does provoke strong reactions. And I think all of those reactions are okay. I know that people come from different places and faith and different of comfort with the Bible. I am really okay with that. I know I was joking earlier about you should read my book instead of Genesis, but actually there are plenty of amazing resources, including a few months, probably six or seven months before my book came out. You may have heard of Marilyn Robinson Pulitzer Prizewinning author. She came out with a book called Reading Genesis, and for some readers that is a better book for them. It goes through Genesis more like a commentary. And in fact, I had recently, I had a kind of tough review that found that book much more useful than mine, and frankly, I am okay with that. The fact is, when we engage these texts that have so much spiritual memory attached to them, even so much embodied memory, I think there are different ways that we need to engage. And I just want to say the goal of my book was spiritual autonomy for people. It is not to tell people how to think. It is not to tell people how to construct a faith or deconstruct a faith or whatever.
My goal is spiritual and creative autonomy, and if I can cultivate that in readers, then I have done well. I have met my goals. And so I think especially for folks who have some history with the Bible, I just want to encourage them to trust their own voice as they approach this text. And that may include buying my book, which I certainly would not mind, but it may include just never opening the book again and stuffing their Bible into the nearest garbage disposal. And that's okay too. I really trust that the journey that each of us is on spiritually is the one we need to take. And so I just want to offer you permission to go on that journey.
Charlotte Donlon:
That's a beautiful invitation and I appreciate how your book is accompanying me on a more imaginative reading of the Bible. It's in ways that help me know more of myself and more of God and more surety about who I am with God and in God. So at least with me your has come true. So thank you.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Thank you for that. That's kind.
Charlotte Donlon:
And I'm sure it's come true for others too. And I definitely recommend Knock at the sky to anyone who has not read it yet. That's what it looks like. It's beautiful, beautiful book. We didn't even talk about this book as an object. We might have to do this again soon and talk more about different things we
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Can bring my husband on. He'll tell you about the art.
Charlotte Donlon:
Yes, that'd be great. That'd be great. Alright, well thanks so much for joining me, Liz. I hope you have a lovely rest of the day. Have a good week, and I hope that you're able to inhabit your waiting in ways that are meaningful and good most of the time.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Amen. May it be. Appreciate you.
Charlotte Donlon:
Alright, thank you.
Liz Charlotte Grant:
Bye.