"During the pandemic of 2020, cloistered inside my "bubble" of immediate family, with my books, the internet and this (proto)manuscript as company, I was struck a metaphor for the Bible's prevalence in U.S. culture: its influence is actually, not metaphorically, epidemic. Thinking so much of contagion and transmission, I simply can't imagine a person living in the U.S. for a year without, at some point, physically encountering a Bible or spending...