Strata: The Bible In the News: Beating Around the Bush

This year, while moving mulch in our garden, I mulled over some of the Biblical passages dealing with horticulture and imagined how writers for the popular press, generally a fecund group, would apply them. After a couple of unfruitful leads, I decided to try once more to reap a rich harvest from the pages of the popular press. I went to the episode of the Burning Bush in Exodus 3. At last—I hit pay dirt!

This was not entirely unexpected. In what was, I think, my first “The Bible in the News” column, I referred to an inspired headline—“Searing Sounds Spout from a Burning Bush”—from a 1997 Omaha World-Herald piece by The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd. The “Bush” in question here was then-Texas governor George W. Bush, who made highly critical remarks aimed at President Bill Clinton on the supposedly nonpolitical occasion of the dedication of the presidential library of George H.W. Bush.