Time for another one of these blogs, since I just finished watching the entire Bill Moyers interview with Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.

I will examine a few aspects of this interview that are crucial, and the first actually came at the end of the interview:

WRIGHT: "[W]here in our religious traditions are there passages in our sacred scriptures that are racist? They're in the Vedas, the Babylonian Talmud, they're in the Koran, they're in the Bible. How do we grapple with these passages in our sacred texts? The same way you grapple with Judges:19, where it's alright for a preacher to have a concubine and cut her up into 12 pieces."

With all due respect to Pastor Wright, he's wrong on this point, as he is on many significant things. What the Bible records it does not always approve of. I'm sure you could say that about other religious texts as well.

Nevertheless, a more thorough reading of this passage will reveal that the woman was already dead when the Levite dismembered her. She had been abused by the sons of Belial and died trying to get back into her house. Yes, he cut her up, but he didn't kill her, and nowhere in the passage does it say that the violence that was done to her -- while she was alive -- was right.

"To each of the tribes, in their respective meetings, he sent by special messengers a remonstrance of the wrong that was done him, in all its aggravating circumstances, and with it a piece of his wife’s dead body (v. 29), both to confirm the truth of the story and to affect them the more with it."