No amount of study can prepare you for what the Bible actually is: it is alive, it is real, and it will slice your heart to shreds. Together, my neighbor and I, two opposites on the extreme poles of privilege in America, together we let the Bible read us.
In many ways, I am unlearning much of what was taught to me in higher education. Here, in the actual land of immigrants and poor and tired and huddled masses, neither test scores nor pitch-perfect doctrines matter much at all. I was trained to believe that those who were more educated had a civic duty to go out and teach those who were not. Stratification as a result of education ensued; hierarchy was not merely encouraged, but considered biblical.