New book plumbs the creation account in Genesis as an antidote to modern woes
SAN DIEGO: It seems like vice, confusion, and personal alienation are gripping our world more ferociously with each passing day. A new book from Catholic Answers Press seeks out the causes of our troubles—and identifies solutions—at their very root. With In the Beginning: Crucial Lessons for Our World from the First Three Chapters of Genesis, theologian Monica Migliorino Miller (Abandoned) offers more than a popular study of the Bible’s opening pages. She draws out of those familiar (and sometimes confounding) verses about the Creation and Fall a fresh, stunning vision of mankind’s dignity and destiny.
Contrasting the ancient world’s prevailing pagan despair with Genesis’s revolutionary new truth that God created the world and saw it all as good, Miller unpacks the rich meaning of these chapters, verse by verse and word by word: peeling back the powerful truths this new revelation communicates about nature, the human body and soul, sex and procreation, the purpose of life, and what comes after death.
Miller then takes up the cultural chaos of our day and links it to mankind’s rejection of those truths. All the signature miseries of modern times—especially those connected to sex, gender, marriage, the environment—are traceable to our first parents’ rebellion against God and humanity’s long, slow reversion to pagan pessimism and error.
“People who argue about whether Genesis is ‘literal’ or ‘symbolic’ are missing the point,” says Todd Aglialoro, director of publishing for Catholic Answers Press. “As In the Beginning shows, the creation story in Genesis is above all a new way of seeing the universe and our place in it.”
About the Author:
Monica Migliorino Miller, Ph.D., is a theologian, author, and activist.
Contact: Kerry Beck
kbeck@catholic.com
619-387-7200