"Fundamentalist religious movements...take words spoken five hundred or fourteen hundred or two thousand or fourteen hundred years ago and apply them, sharia-style, asa if they were intended to serve as today's annotated legal code, todays' constitution, today's how-to manual. They underestimate how the original words and teachings were situated--how deeply their sacred texts were rooted in gritty contemporary problems and human social contexts; instead, they see their sacred texts as timeless, placeless utterances coming from an arid, Platonic plane of universal abstractions.
And these fundamentalist movements also underestimate how equally situated their own interpretations and applications are. They don't recognize how movements and countermovements swirl around sacred texts like currents in a river, or how those shifting currents influnece their interpretations and appliations at every turn."
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