New Bible Museum Tells A Clear Story
Philip Kennicott surveys the scene: ‘What [the museum] does well, it does as well or better than any museum in the country, and its failings, which are significant, will be difficult to detect for anyone who isn’t a scholar, or firmly committed secularist. The new attraction is an up-to-date version of an old-fashioned museum, telling linear stories in a complex and detailed way. It doesn’t foreground trendy ideas about multiculturalism, and it isn’t “thematic,†or focused on broad ideas at the expense of chronological clarity. It gives a straightforward account of American history, from the first colonists to the civil rights era and beyond, through the prism of the Bible, but in a way that many visitors will probably find more compelling and accessible than the dense cultural stew on view at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History.’
