Liberating Jonah

Ethics Daily has just run an article on Miguel De La Torre's latest book Liberating Jonah: Forming an Ethic of Reconciliation.

New Book Examines Jonah Story from the Underside of Oppression

Bob Allen
11-01-07

The Old Testament story of Jonah is more than a fairy tale about a man being swallowed by a whale, and even more than an evangelical call to preach the gospel to those in foreign lands, but instead a model for reconciliation between the haves and the have-nots, says a new book.

In Liberating Jonah: Forming an Ethic of Reconciliation, EthicsDaily.com columnist Miguel De La Torre suggests that the reading of Jonah he learned in Sunday school--that God is calling America, as the most powerful nation in the world, to carry the light to those in darkness--is upside down.

The power in the Book of Jonah is the Assyrian Empire, brutal conquerors of the Israelites whom Jonah and his contemporaries likely viewed with hatred and scorn. Reading the text from the perspective of the disenfranchised, De La Torre says the United States is not the hero but the villain.

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