Sarah Ruden is the author of The Face of Water: A Translator on Beauty and Meaning in the Bible. She has recently published translations of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Saint Augustine’s Confessions in the Modern Library, and she is currently at work on a new translation of the Gospels.
My father was an extreme example of America’s freakish ideology, in which the body has been deemed not so much the honorable container of the soul but something detachable from it and combustible as fuel.