“Safety and faith are different things,” Katherine Patterson, author of Bridge to Terabithia tells Christianity Today, rejecting the “safe for children” interpretation of religion and art. “If you want everything to be safe, then you can probably just totally do without the imagination.” Patterson, the daughter of missionaries, is a Christian, but she swats away the suggestion that Terabithia is a Christian book, or that Christian writers out to create such things. “I have certainly not tried to write a Christian pamphlet…. A story is open-ended. A story invites you into it to make your own meaning. If you look at Jesus’ parables, I think the Parable of the Sower is about the only one in which his disciples demand that the meaning be spelled out, but most of the stories Jesus tells are very open-ended. I mean, even with the Parable of the Prodigal Son, you get to the ending and you think, Well, did the big brother come in or not?”

Curiously, Christianity Today has published this interview online twice. First in February, under the title “An ‘Unsafe’ Bridge”; now in March, as “Deeper into Terabithia,” with this oddly aggressive dek: “Katherine Paterson says a story reveals a writer’s faith, whether she likes it or not.”