Eugene absorbed how ranchers, woodsmen, and townsfolk talked as he helped in his father's Kalispell, Montana, butcher shop. Later, pastoring a church in Bel Air, Maryland, he paraphrased Galatians to make it more accessible to a class. An editor saw it and urged him to continue. The Message resulted.

Professor of spiritual theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, for years, Eugene is now retired. Mountain climbing is now out; still in: picking banjo and telling bear stories.

The ability to read and the availability of books to read, two features of our culture that we take for granted, had their origin in our ancestors' convictions. They believed it essential that everyone be able to read the Bible and have one to read. The literacy education and the invention that made the mass printing of books, magazines, and newspapers possible were largely fueled by these convictions. Today virtually everybody ten years and older in North America can read. And anybody who wants a Bible can have one.

Now we're faced with this astonishing irony: everybody (I exaggerate slightly) can read, everybody has a Bible (again, a slight exaggeration); yet so much of the reading is misreading and so many of the Bibles are unread (not an exaggeration). How has it come to pass that the enormous success in achieving mass literacy and the revolution in publishing has resulted in such widespread biblical illiteracy?