Connected at first by e-mail, recently by Facebook, and soon by Twitter, folks as far away as Mali, some of whom "never darken the door of a church," have joined in reading the Good Book and sharing their responses.
"It's something I always wanted to do," said James Rowan, a semiretired commercial real estate executive. "But this has forced me to do it in a way I wouldn't have done on my own."
Raised Roman Catholic, Rowan said he had little encouragement in his youth to read the Bible, but as of last week was "almost through Maccabees and getting into the wisdom books."
"It's not going to be easy," Zabriskie, a self-described "theological centrist," had cautioned prospective readers last winter. Like most mainline Protestants, few had ever sat down with the parts he calls "boring and gruesome and strange" that almost never make it into liturgies or homilies.
Even so, many said they had been unprepared for what they had found.
"By the time I got to Leviticus, I was as depressed as could be," Neal Pratt, 72, recalled last week.
Widowed in January, Pratt had supposed that reading the Bible would prove a comfort, "but there just seemed to be no kindness" as the Israelites hacked their way into the Promised Land.
Even God was a shock.
"I had the notion he was a kind person," said Pratt, who was dismayed to find Yahweh repeatedly commanding the Israelites to exterminate whole tribes of enemies.
"I never had a good idea of the contrast between the God of the Old and New Testament. They're not the same person."
The group's recommended version is the Oxford Annotated Bible: the New Revised Standard Version, found in most Episcopal churches.
