The Talking Book casts the Bible as the central character in a vivid portrait of black America, tracing the origins of African-American culture from slavery’s secluded forest prayer meetings to the bright lights and bold style of ...

Here, then, is not the story of a runaway slave but a story of the estrangement of two Christina brothers, Onesimus and Philemon.

Callahan suggests that scholars have wrongly placed the sequence and therefore the importance of the works collectively known as the Johannine tradition - the Gospel of John and the Johannine Epistles.