Reading the Bible Outdoors

In a 1992 lecture delivered at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky Wendell Berry argued that the Bible is a book best read outdoors, a 'hypaethral book, ' such as Thoreau talked about-a book open to the sky. Like most who read the Bible, I had read it outdoors on some occasions. Camps and retreat settings had provided opportunities to sit under a tree or even on a mountaintop and read Scripture. But until I heard Berry's words, I never saw the Bible as an "outdoor book," almost intended for such settings. I happened to have read it under the sky on occasion, but I had not allowed the setting itself to affect my reading. What, I wondered, would it be like to do so? What difference would it make in my reading, my understanding, my capacity to allow myself to be addressed by God? This book is a collection of devotional essays written by ten Master of Divinity students at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary as a class assignment in a course on Creation Care and Spiritual Life during the Fall Semester of 2015 taught by R. Robert Creech, Hubert H. and Gladys S. Raborn Professor of Pastoral Leadership and Director of Pastoral Ministries at Truett.