Influenced by A. J. Jacobs’s The Year of Living Biblically, Harrell managed to recruit 20 members of his Boston congregation to join him in a month-long effort at living Levitically. Holiness was the ultimate goal, but so was learning.

People who take the Bible seriously never know what to do with the book of Leviticus. And yet Leviticus is historically considered by Jews, and thus by Jesus, as the pivotal book of the Hebrew Bible. It’s impossible to fully comprehend such key New Testament terms as sacrifice, atonement, or blood without some understanding of Leviticus. The “second greatest commandment,” which Jesus said was “Love your neighbor as yourself,” comes from Leviticus (19:18).

As a longtime minister and preacher who had successfully skirted Leviticus for most of his life, author Daniel Harrell wanted to come to grips with all that Leviticus teaches–not just loving neighbors, but the parts about animal sacrifice, Sabbath-keeping, skin diseases, homosexuality, and stoning sinners, too. Yet rather than approaching Leviticus with a view toward mitigating its commands, he decided to simply obey them.

The surprising lessons they learned impressed on Harrell both the power of obedience and the necessity of grace. This book traces the adventures of a group of people eager to understand the Bible by living it.

Theological integrity demands that whatever we think about faith and life correspond to the way things actually are in the world we experience and observe as opposed to how we want or hope things to be. God is the God of reality. If evolution is real, then to reject it presents difficulties for Christian faith and theology. The disconnect between evolution and Christian faith challenges theological integrity, forcing believers into either compartmentalization or undue accommodation. A proposed alternative is to assume that ultimate truth resides in the heart and mind of God and to assume evolution to be part of that truth (“all truth is God’s truth”). Based upon confirmed scientific data, a flourishing, robust Christianity stays faithful to the Biblical narrative as its source for theological reflection, while at the same time heralding scientific discovery as an accurate description of the universe on which theology reflects. This robust Christianity embraces evolution as further revelation of God’s hand in the world. Written as a pastor and practitioner, Nature’s Witness provides scientific information and theological reflection making the connection between faith and evolution comprehensible, authentic and less fearful.