"Biblical names are hot again"
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“Biblical names are hot again” lands like a shrug with a raised eyebrow: ancient text, modern trend cycle. Anita Diament isn’t praising piety so much as clocking how quickly the culture raids the past for aesthetic fuel. “Hot” is the tell. It’s the language of fashion, not faith, which reframes Abraham, Sarah, and Ezra as accessories you can pin on a birth certificate. The line works because it’s a quiet collision of registers: the sacred and the marketable in the same breath.
Diament, a novelist known for reanimating biblical women with contemporary interiority, is especially attuned to what gets revived and why. The subtext is about control over narrative. Naming a child is one of the few acts that feels both intimate and public: parents project heritage, aspiration, and identity politics into a single word strangers will pronounce forever. When biblical names cycle back, it can signal a hunger for rootedness in a culture that feels unmoored, or a softer, craftier form of tradition that doesn’t require subscribing to the whole package of belief.
There’s also an implicit critique of selective nostalgia. People want the gravitas and familiarity of scripture without the discomforting parts of scripture. A biblical name can read as classic, multicultural, “meaningful,” even literary. Diament’s sentence captures how religion persists in secular life less as doctrine than as branding: the old stories still sell, especially when repackaged as personal style.
Diament, a novelist known for reanimating biblical women with contemporary interiority, is especially attuned to what gets revived and why. The subtext is about control over narrative. Naming a child is one of the few acts that feels both intimate and public: parents project heritage, aspiration, and identity politics into a single word strangers will pronounce forever. When biblical names cycle back, it can signal a hunger for rootedness in a culture that feels unmoored, or a softer, craftier form of tradition that doesn’t require subscribing to the whole package of belief.
There’s also an implicit critique of selective nostalgia. People want the gravitas and familiarity of scripture without the discomforting parts of scripture. A biblical name can read as classic, multicultural, “meaningful,” even literary. Diament’s sentence captures how religion persists in secular life less as doctrine than as branding: the old stories still sell, especially when repackaged as personal style.
Quote Details
| Topic | Bible |
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