Unless specified otherwise, all biblical quotations come from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version [Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ, 1989]). The NRSV combines attention to recent scholarship, concern about gender inclusiveness, and readability. In many cases, however, I have elected to use other translations when the passage was either more familiar—as when Jesus says, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his own soul?”—or when other translations made my point a bit easier to understand. In a few cases I have made reference to the original language of the text when the translation itself is controversial, as is the case with the apparent placement of a solid dome overhead in the Genesis creation story, which is denied vigorously by creationists.