This essay is written by MAYDAY magazine’s Critic in Residence for Spring 2025.
Sharp bits of gravel poke through my leggings into my thighs. Chilly autumn air wafts from the moonlit surface of the Big Thompson River to where I am sitting in the middle of the path. Flecks of cigar paper cling to my lip; nicotine and Scotch mingle on my breath and in my bloodstream. I am sobbing, angry, and drunkenly attempting to articulate to my husband how upset I am over Liz Charlotte Grant’s new book, Knock at the Sky.
That was in early September. Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible was released by Eerdmans in January 2025, but I got an advance copy months earlier because I was eager for Grant’s project. Though I no longer move in the progressive Christian circles where Grant does most of her writing, I’m familiar with her award-winning newsletter, “The Empathy List,”1 and the viral article she published in February 2024 interrogating the legacy of purity culture icon Elisabeth Elliot.2 Knock at the Sky is her first book. It appears to be written for people exactly like me: those who grew up steeped in evangelical Christianity and its creeds of inerrancy, but for whom the coherent and comprehensive warp and weft of faith coupled with institutional allegiance had, at some imprecise point, started to unravel.
Like Grant, I was raised deep within the world of conservative evangelical Christianity. I attended (and adored) church all throughout my childhood and adolescence, and when I left that church at 18, it was to move across the country to attend a private Christian college, from which I earned a bachelor’s degree in Biblical Studies. For all those years, I was a model believer: volunteered with the youth group, led a Bible study during school lunches, proudly wore my purity ring as a symbol of saving myself for marriage. Grant lists a similar set of credentials. “I used to be a good evangelical,” she writes. “I aced every Bible class in my private Christian high school and nearly earned a minor in Bible at my prestigious Christian college. I never missed youth group, spent my summers laying bricks for the needy in Mexico, and woke up early for a regular quiet time.”3 Any evangelical who took their faith seriously during the ’90s, the ’00s, and the ’10s has a list like this. So much was expected of us, and we performed it all exactly as our elders and mentors hoped. Grant doesn’t specify why she “left evangelicalism behind,” only that she has, and she’s seeking new ways to engage with her still-sacred texts. “I am returning to the Scriptures,” she writes. “But I am reading it slant.”4
Knock at the Sky purports to answer the question, “How do I learn to love my Bible again?” Since Genesis is, for many of Grant’s readers, an all-too-familiar text, Grant’s intention is to defamiliarize the ancient stories, exploring them from a different vantage and incorporating other voices. She presents clearly her process and methodology, giving the book an explorative and educational tone that I would term “textbook-lite.” In a section toward the beginning, called “On Sources, Midrash, and Textual Authority,” Grant states, “I rarely refer to white voices, especially white male voices […] because at the time of the writing, I was familiar with the thrust of white male theology already, and I was hungry for more, for different.”5 Her bibliography includes Jewish rabbis, early Christian mystics, and feminist and liberation theologians. While certain religious institutions and schools of thought eagerly embrace this kind of cross-denominational and even interfaith approach, whether or not a reader has been exposed to these voices and perspectives is highly dependent on one’s individual background.
Each of Grant’s chapters, which are presented as braided essays, opens with a bespoke collage done by artist Jeremy Grant (who is married to the author). The collage is paired with a short italicized summary of what is covered in the upcoming chapter. For chapter four, “Doomsday,” the abstract reads, “DISCUSSED: Michelangelo’s ‘The Last Judgment,’ Iconoclasm, Fear of Hell, What We Mean When We Say the ‘Old Testament God,’ the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery, Francisco de Vitoria, Roger Williams, Fratricide, One Hundred and Twenty Years, Erosion, One Thousand Worlds, Changing Our Minds, Noah Gets Wet.6” She weaves together stories from the biblical text, interpretations from various religious traditions, historical anecdotes, and parallels or illustrations from the natural world and anthropology. She emphasizes wonder, mystery, and beauty. Like the collages that initiate each chapter, the book assembles a range of different source materials and compiles them to create a novel piece.
However, Grant seems to skate through much of her material. She settles on what interests her and elides passages that don’t fit with her project. The braided essay style allows Grant to toggle between the biblical text and extrabiblical material, but the effect is that her essays feel disjointed and hard to follow. To my surprise, Knock at the Sky doesn’t extend all the way through Genesis. “This book examines Genesis 1-32, the first two acts of Genesis, exploring the creation account through Jacob’s wrestling match with God or an angel,” she states.7 Grant does not explain why she neglects the final act of her central text. This is one of multiple instances in which Grant’s stated intentions are not fully realized within the scope of the book.
This imbalance is replicated in her pre-chapter abstracts. In chapter five, she lists surrealist filmmaker Darren Aronofsky among her topics to be discussed; he’s mentioned in a half-sentence parenthetical.8 I often found myself waiting to circle back to certain points or particularly challenging stories, such as the incident immediately following the flood, when Noah gets drunk and “lay uncovered in his tent,” which prompts some kind of morally ambiguous familial response that ends with Noah cursing Cain (Genesis 9:20-27). What does Grant make of it? Nothing. She skips right over it, as if the unseemly tale itself were covered by a concealing garment.
I had been so eager for Grant’s book—which is perhaps why I felt all the more devastated and betrayed when the book fell short of my expectations.
The role of the critic is always a delicate one. Claire Dederer, in her book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, writes, “I knew I was supposed to be a cultural arbiter, but I kept slipping up and being the audience.”9 I cannot separate my intellectual reception of Knock at the Sky from my personal experience of it—and my experience of it was triggering.
Knock at the Sky is branded as a reconsideration of Genesis for people who have “lost faith in the Bible,” which in many cases is considered synonymous with losing faith in the institutions that taught us the Bible. This is my story, and based on Grant’s writings, it is also hers to some degree. (However, it should be noted that “leaving evangelicalism” is not the same as rejecting Christianity as a whole.) This story has become so common that this process of religious renegotiation has a name: deconstruction. Jeanna Kadlec, in her memoir Heretic, defines deconstruction as “the process of excavating one’s former faith to see if anything is salvageable.”10 Sarah McCammon, NPR journalist and author of The Exvangelicals, writes, “Those raised in white American evangelicalism have witnessed the realization of many of the most fervent fever dreams of the religious right. […] For many, these developments have been a tipping point and have brought to a head years of doubt, discomfort, and trauma that can no longer be ignored.”11
What many outside the “deconstruction movement” fail to recognize is that to call it a movement suggests greater centralization and consistency than actually exist. “Deconstructors” are sometimes villainized as bad actors with malicious, seditious intent. The process of reckoning with one’s beliefs and the texts, institutions, and communities that shape them is intensely personal—all the more so for folks recovering from authoritarian spaces that seek to codify and homogenize each person’s diaphanous and nuanced experience of the Divine. People land in all different spaces: some find a home within other denominational expressions of faith, others declare themselves fully deconverted, and still others—on most days, I would place myself here—cannot scrub themselves of reverence for the Divine but struggle with skepticism regarding the framework of contemporary religion. Deconstruction is sparked by as many different ignition points as there are people, if not more. Grant is writing into a flashpoint, and whatever helps her “love [her] Bible again” may or may not prove meaningful to others.
I started reading Knock at the Sky last August, during a girls’ weekend at a remote lake in east Texas. I didn’t make it through the foreword, by Jesus Feminist author Sarah Bessey, without checking Twitter as a distraction. Bessey writes of her friend, “Liz is my favorite type of stubborn: the faithful kind. She won’t give up her Bible just because some folks use it badly or disingenuously and ignorantly.”12 Bessey’s comment implicitly establishes two kinds of reader: those who are exalted in their likeness to the author and her unwillingness to give up the Bible, and those like me, who might still decide to walk away. Another common misunderstanding about deconstruction is the level of agency many people feel about their own deconstruction process: in a manner similar to how Christians have historically debated one’s ability to choose to believe in God, deconstruction isn’t necessarily a conscious choice. In the poem “Apologetics,” Sara Triana writes, “It’s like the thing in me called faith in these particular things just slipped out of my open mouth one night while I was dreaming.”13 The poet illustrates that sometimes belief and nonbelief feel like matters beyond volition. Bessey’s comment about Grant—“She won’t give up her Bible”—made me feel ashamed and manipulated, the same feelings that drove me away from church before. I know that I’m opening myself up to critique by admitting that my deconstruction was fueled, at least in part, by a factor as fickle as feelings. But I expected more empathy from Bessey and Grant; instead, I started the book feeling blamed for my doubts.
During Grant’s “note to current and former evangelicals,” I repeatedly stifled the physical urge to stand up from my deck chair and hurl my advance copy into the lake. “Without these stories,” Grant suggests, “we cannot maintain the imagination required to nurture belief.”14 In this way, Grant seems to constrain the possible outcomes of the wandering she invites. I recalled my church leaders encouraging me to question my beliefs, but only as long as my questions led me to the “right answers.” Discussion guides with predetermined responses. The framing of the book implicitly echoes these exclusionary, painful memories from my days of devotion. I rocked in my deck chair as a form of stimming. I swigged Prosecco like it was water.
Genesis is a famously challenging book, spanning from the first breath of the universe through the generational history of the patriarchs whose descendents became the nation of Israel. Its pages contain some sordid stories, not to mention an account of the Divine drowning all but one family of the species that bear the Divine’s holy image. Given Grant’s declaration that she would be reading it slant, I was surprised to find that her text doesn’t substantially deviate from stories and interpretations I’d already heard.
I’d read about half of Knock at the Sky by early September, and I didn’t know how I was going to be able to finish it, much less write about it. In the middle of a gravel path alongside the Big Thompson River, I cried to my husband about my disappointment. “I wanted so much more from this book,” I said. I picked up the book hoping to find someone wrestling with the sacred text in ways that felt personal and audacious and authentic, and instead I found doctrines I’d been familiar with for years.
After undergrad, I spent years in a curriculum-heavy progressive Christian volunteer corps. While there is much from my private Christian college experience that I take issue with now, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the incredibly high caliber of education I received there, inclusive of rabbinic and minoritized perspectives and expansive in the way it considered the impact of genre in the sacred texts (i.e. don’t read what’s meant to be poetry as literal factual retelling [I’m looking at you, six-day Creationists]). But it doesn’t make Grant’s book bad, nor does it diminish her scholarship just because I’d heard certain arguments before. Moreover, while my strain of evangelicalism encouraged education, many more conservative groups do not, so Grant’s book is commendable for its accessibility.
Grant does a great job including feminist perspectives. In fact, my favorite element of Knock at the Sky is Grant’s sustained consideration of the story of Hagar, the Egyptian handmaiden of Sarai (renamed Sarah), wife of the patriarch Abraham and mother of Isaac. Hagar, the slave, was given as a surrogate to Abram (nonconsensually, the reader can assume), and she bore him Ishmael. When Isaac, the son of the promise, was born, Hagar and her child were sent away. In other readings, Hagar’s suffering can be sidelined, even disregarded. She’s manipulated and abused by Sarah and Abraham and then blamed for it.15 Grant, in her reading, centers Hagar as the main character and highlights the way God shows her personal care. “Hagar, the undervalued and afflicted enslaved woman with no [family] name, is proof that God hears and God responds with particular attention to those at the bottom,” Grant writes. “Liberation may delay, but it will not be thwarted.”16 The idea that God’s priority aligns with the oppressed—or, to borrow a phrase from “the Black prophet-mystic” Howard Thurman, “those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall”17—is a key tenet of liberation theology, a 20th-century movement among theologians and priests of color concentrated in Latin and Central America.18 One major category of grievances that turns people away from contemporary evangelicalism is that the Scriptures are whitewashed, preached with a patriarchy that is not inherent to the text,19 and used to maintain rather than overturn existing power structures. In the contemporary American context, Grant’s incorporation of liberation theology is one of the most vital and redemptive aspects of her book.
By writing about the first recording of whale song, the self-immolation of Tibetan monks, and testimonies of individuals struck by lightning alongside the biblical commentary, I imagine that Grant sought to illuminate the dusty biblical account with contemporary parallels and insights. But for me, the book’s pastiche-like style felt distracting. Grant’s rapid subject changes keep her investigations more superficial than I would have liked, and the format overall feels reminiscent of a sermon that a pastor attempts to bulk up with some jokes and personal insertions. By the time I reached the end of Knock at the Sky, I felt more like Grant wrote about the general topic of biblical interpretation and merely used Genesis for some key examples, rather than having systematically worked her way through the first book of the Bible. But I wanted to test my own reactions, to check if I would react the same way to any book on the subject—so I got a copy of Reading Genesis, by Marilynne Robinson.
Robinson, the author of Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack, is perhaps the most well-respected Calvinist novelist in mainstream American literature today. Reading Genesis was released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2024. It is a 345-page tome broken into two sections. The first 230 pages are Robinson’s own commentary on Genesis, straight through, no stone left unturned. The second section contains the full King James Version of Genesis.
Maybe it’s unfair to consider Knock at the Sky alongside Robinson’s Reading Genesis. The two authors don’t necessarily have the same project, though both books undertake a close reading of the same sacred text. Grant is more explicit about her intentions and motivations, situating her book within a specific context. “I am not ready to cede the Bible to the literalists,” she writes in her opening note. “While some of my formerly evangelical peers prefer to ditch this often-troubling book altogether, I refuse to. These stories are mine, too.”20 Robinson doesn’t bother introducing herself; instead, she launches right in. “The Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil,”21 she opens. (If Grant’s book reads as “textbook-lite,” nothing about Reading Genesis is light.) Robinson feels no compunction to play nice with her reader, to ease them in, or to justify her interest in the Bible. Whereas Grant picks and chooses the passages she engages with and at what depth, Robinson’s commentary is exhaustive. What I found in Reading Genesis helped me understand my frustrations with Knock at the Sky.
Robinson doesn’t flinch away from the uncomfortable stories or the sordid ones. Right when the Biblical characters are at their worst, she leans in. Robinson points out the Bible’s attentiveness to the patriarchs’ shortcomings, stating, “It must be noted how unsparing the text is in its treatment of these great figures […] This is a consistent feature of Genesis going back to Noah.”22 She emphasizes the ugly and unusual aspects of Genesis. In these neglected moments, Robinson finds evidence for the consistency and unity of the biblical perspective. She writes, “God’s great constancy lies not in any one covenant but in the unshakeable will to be in covenant with willful, small-minded, homicidal humankind.”23 Robinson’s attention to the overlooked portions allows her to emerge with a coherent argument, whereas Grant never quite articulates a definitive thesis. In this way, Grant’s book reminded me too much of the slapdash, haphazard style of evangelicalism that doesn’t want anyone to look too closely, lest they realize the pastor is a predator or everyone’s favorite Sunday School teacher is gay or the congregation doesn’t welcome people of color. Grant’s evasiveness allowed me to maintain the suspicion that she doesn’t fully trust the biblical text to square with her progressive values. “Two things appear to be true,” Grant writes. “God is mercy; God is also justice. God is not evil, yet determinedly overlooks the evil of God’s creatures […] Are you confused yet? We, the beings so easily crushed beneath the Divine’s sole like ants beneath the sandal of a cartoon Zeus, cannot always make God’s actions square.”24 It could be my religious trauma speaking, but to me, this dismissal reads as flippant and demeaning: a directive toward fearful retreat rather than an invitation toward wonder.
Robinson’s fearlessness demonstrates an ultimate trust in the divine hand behind the text. “Providence can be seen,” she writes, “working its way through very mingled human history, blessing it with music and with drifting pastoralists and their herds, sometimes, unpredictably, transmuting evil into good. Measured revenge, justice as it is understood among mortals, is rigorously queried in Scripture, challenged in the text by a higher awareness, a knowledge of what could be lost if small earthly dramas of action and reaction foreclosed whatever might come in the fullness of time.”25 The robust quality of Robinson’s inquiry combined with her transcendent prose made me feel more enveloped in the stories of the Bible than I had in over a decade.
Ultimately, I don’t think I turned out to be the ideal reader for Grant’s book. Because of the intimate and subjective nature of deconstruction, perhaps anyone writing about such delicate, vulnerable material will manage to rub up against someone’s wounds. That doesn’t mean that the writing shouldn’t happen or that it isn’t worthwhile. If anything, we need more of it: more stories, more interpretations, more wrestling, more authentic conversations about the turns and twists on the path of belief, nonbelief, and all the ambiguous and equally acceptable spaces in between. I think back to that night by the Big Thompson. Instead of focusing on myself and my feelings and my vices in the middle of the walkway, I think about the river. Spirit hovering over the face of the water.
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1 https://www.thempathylist.com/
2 Liz Charlotte Grant, “Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage,” published at The Revealer, Feb. 6, 2024; https://therevealer.org/elisabeth-elliot-flawed-queen-of-purity-culture-and-her-manipulative-third-husband/
3 Liz Charlotte Grant, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible (Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2025), 20.
4 Ibid., 24-25.
5 Ibid., 33.
6 Ibid., 90.
7 Ibid., 30.
8 Ibid., 112.
9 Claire Dederer, Monsters: a Fan’s Dilemma (Knopf, 2023), 63.
10 Jeanna Kadlec, Heretic: A Memoir (HarperCollins: 2022), 129.
11 Sarah McCammon, The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), 3.
12 Liz Charlotte Grant, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible (Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2025), 16.
13 Sara Triana, Spread Thick (Finishing Line Press, 2022), 39.
14 Liz Charlotte Grant, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible (Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2025), 25.
15 “Abraham and Hagar tried to get God’s promised blessing by their own strength without relying on God’s supernatural enablement.” John Piper, “Hagar and Slavery Vs. Sarah and Freedom,” from Desiring God Ministries; https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/hagar-and-slavery-vs-sarah-and-freedom.
16 Ibid., 185.
17 Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Beacon Press, 1976), 1.
18 “After 50 Years, ‘Liberation Theology’ is Still Reshaping Catholicism and Politics–But What Is It?” Leo Guardado, The Conversation; https://theconversation.com/after-50-years-liberation-theology-is-still-reshaping-catholicism-and-politics-but-what-is-it-186804.
19See Beth Allison Barr, The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth (Brazos Press: 2021).
20 Ibid., 25.
21 Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 3.
22 Ibid., 183.
23 Ibid., 53.
24 Liz Charlotte Grant, Knock at the Sky: Seeking God in Genesis After Losing Faith in the Bible (Eerdmans Publishing Co, 2025), 102.
25 Marilynne Robinson, Reading Genesis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 211-212.
MCKENZIE WATSON-FORE is a writer, artist, and critic currently based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University and a BA in Biblical Studies from Gordon College. She serves as the executive editor of sneaker wave magazine, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Full Stop, Christian Century, the Offing, CALYX, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, she dances Argentine tango, knits baby cardigans, and watercolors her feelings. McKenzie can be found at MWatsonFore.com.
