In Coats’s telling, the relationships of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Rachel and Leah, and Joseph and his brothers take on stunning contemporary relevance as these characters find themselves confronted with extraordinary situations and circumstances that they’d neither asked for nor had anything to say about. Using stories from his life as well as the lives of people he’s known, Coats creates a rubric you can use to examine your own life and to discover aspects of yourself in the characters whose lives unfold in these primordial stories. How has Eve’s story shaped yours? Is your life reflected in Jacob’s evolution to wisdom? In Joseph’s youthful arrogance? Coats explores the strengths and weaknesses of the men and women in Genesis, pulling back the wrappings that have hidden their humanity to reveal the vibrant drama of these foundational narratives. "Different clothing, yes, and language, and customs, yet at the human level," he writes, "they were just as greedy and generous as we are, as gullible and crafty, as moronic and brilliant, as cowardly and brave. They are us, their stories, our stories, mirrors in which to see our best and worst selves."
My heritage is Southern Baptist, but it was in a Roman Catholic church that, in the fall of 1958, a few months after my twelfth birthday, I was left more than a little undone by what was either an "ecstatic experience" or "surely an allergic reaction, perhaps to the incense." It was a split second in my sixty-three years, yet the man I've become, and all that I've done in my professional life--Episcopal priest, speaker and trainer for an international foundation, management consultant, writer--can be traced back to that moment which, these five decades later, remains a mystery.
