For the Puritans, the God-centered life meant making the quest for spiritual and moral holiness the great business of life.

The Puritans were obsessed with the dangers of wealth.

My claim is simply that the literary approach is one necessary way to read and interpret the Bible, an approach that has been unjustifiably neglected. Despite that neglect, the literary approach builds at every turn on what biblical scholars have done to recover the original, intended meaning of the biblical text.

Literature takes reality and human experience as its starting point, transforms it by means of the imagination, and sends readers back to life with renewed understanding of it and zest for it because of their excursions into a purely imaginary realm.

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life.

Since God is the one who calls people to their work, the worker becomes a steward who serves God.

The secularization of Western culture was accompanied by the elevation of art to the position of a substitute religion to replace Christianity.