Garrett Glass, author of Jehoshua: Signs & Wonders, takes a historical look at the Crucifixion, here. Read more about Glass at the Patheos Book Club. One of the more striking scenes in the I, Claudius television series, first broadcast on the BBC in the 1970s, was the request Livia made to her grandson Claudius. She wanted to be made a goddess and have all the proper funerary rights after her death, in exchange for which she confessed to him her... Read more
By Richard Cole Author, Catholic By Choice This time every year, I think about the celebration of Easter in Australia. What’s it like down under where Lent is the high tide of autumn and Easter is a harvest season? For one thing, I’m told that you won’t see any chocolate Easter bunnies. Rabbits are an invasive species causing significant damage to crops and the environment. Instead, parents tell their children that Easter eggs are hidden by the Easter bilby, a... Read more
Alister McGrath’s new book If I Had Lunch With C.S. Lewis walks the reader through imaginary sittings with Lewis where he would mentor his listeners through major life issues and questions. One of those life issues is hidden in plain sight. We’re so used to seeing Lewis as a Christian apologist and storyteller that we forget that he was a professor – at both Oxford and Cambridge. And Lewis had much to say about the importance of what he did, about education.... Read more
By Tom Holmes Most likely, the story of Jesus and his followers that Oak Park resident Garrett Glass tells in his newly published novel Jehoshua, Signs and Wonders, is not the one you heard in Sunday school. Start with the name. Jehoshua, writes Glass, was the name we now know as Jesus, pronounced Yo-SHEW-ah in Hebrew in his First-Century hometown of Nazareth (JOSH-yew-ah in English). In fact, Glass’ book can be seen as a deconstruction, i.e. an attempt to get... Read more
I’ll begin with a confession: I’ve never been able to “get into” C. S. Lewis. As a child, the Narnia stories never held the magic for me that they did for my friends, and as an adult, despite committing myself to The Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, and The Great Divorce, I just couldn’t connect. Where others found Lewis’s writing intimate and enlightening, I found it cool and formal. Being an English professor, writer, and Christian myself, this... Read more
By Ramesh Rao Indeed, it is rather rare to find a Christian minister married to a Hindu monk in this world, and it is also quite possible that they are the only such couple in the world, making the book Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk written by Dana Trent, the Southern Baptist minister, a very interesting read, with some fascinating insights into the dynamic of making such a marriage work. The... Read more
My endorsement of Rev. Dana Trent’s wonderful new book, Saffron Cross, appears on the book’s back cover, so I’m not going to praise the book or encourage you to read it other than to say this is a great book and you should read it. Nor am I going to critique the book, because there is nothing to critique: Dana is sharing her story, and not telling every Christian woman to marry a former Hindu monk. What I am going... Read more
When I was writing my doctoral dissertation on the impact of the Internet on practices of evangelism, Lutheran pastor Clint Schnekloth’s Mediating Faith: Faith Formation in a Trans-Media Era is the book I always wished existed but never could find. The vast majority of texts on the relationship between Christians and technology treat technology as a supplement to faith, an additional realm of engagement offering the potential for networking, evangelizing, community-building, or education outside of the “real,” brick-and-mortar physical church.... Read more
This month at the Book Club, we’re featuring a new book by Baptist minister J. Dana Trent called Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk. We invited the Rev. Trent to reflect on some questions about the gifts and challenges of her interfaith marriage for us here. Tell us about the title of your book. We wanted a simple title that reflected the seemingly contradictory nature of a Baptist minister marrying a Hindu monk.... Read more
Prolific author and scholar Alister McGrath talks about his new book If I Had Lunch with C. S. Lewis: Exploring the Ideas of C. S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life for the Patheos Book Club. Why another book on Lewis? The 50th anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis led to a surge of books about him. I wrote two of them myself! So why yet another one? Let me tell you why. Many people knew I was writing about... Read more
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