Our new series, the Lives of Great Religious Books is based on the idea that books, like people, are born and live fascinating lives worthy of biographical treatment. Now to get truly meta — can we then extend it out to say that series are like books are like people in the same way?

That is one way to look at this Q&A between religion editor Fred Appel and Ruth Braunstein at The Immanent Frame in which Fred reveals how the idea behind the series was actually born of a discussion with Avishai Margalit many years ago in a faculty lounge at NYU Law School.

If we accept that series are like books are like people — perhaps this closing paragraph in which Fred reveals his “wish list” of future biographical subjects can be viewed as the series version of a personal ad (“Established series seeks unattached authors for fun and stimulating conversation, must like dogs.“).

I would love to commission an accessible, lively biography of the Daodejing, and I’m also looking for a biography of the Talmud. I’ve been talking to one or two people about that. It is a tremendously important book in the Jewish tradition, and one that has had a fascinating history, not just within Jewish communities in Europe, in the Sephardic world, and in this country, but also in the Christian and Islamic worlds. I would love to commission a biography of Exodus as well. The liberationist story has been so very important. Michael Walzer, as I mentioned, wrote an important book about Exodus from the perspective of political theory and the history of political thought, but I think it’s time for a new book, and perhaps one written from a different perspective. The Koran is of course something that I’ve been thinking about a lot as well. There are a lot of fine Koranic scholars out there, but the state of that field, or subfield, is such that most people are writing in very specialized modes, for other specialists. So finding someone who can write engagingly and accessibly for the general educated public is something of a challenge. But that’s what keeps me busy, and that’s what makes it fun.