It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a treat Good Omens is. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett will also tell you how much of a treat it is. They will tell you in their introduction and their afterward how much they wrote it for the love of it […]
Not Very Big Love
I wanted to categorize this as Horror but decided to stick with Religion. This is a pretty intense story. If you are sensitive to stories involving sexual assault, particularly when children are involved, I would suggest to pass over it. There is a happy ending though since most of these fuckers received decades long prison sentences. Rebecca Musser was born into the FDLS church. She was the daughter of a second (or “Celestial”) wife and her father’s first wife physically and emotionally abused the children […]
We need a new category for Mystery-Love Story-Religious Thrillers
The Wonder brings so many of my favourite elements together – a mystery, faith, a love story, and Ireland. It basically hit all the right notes for me. Anna is a young Irish girl, who is gaining fame for being able to live without eating for weeks. Lib, an English nurse and self-proclaimed skeptic, is hired to observe and substantiate the claims that this is an honest-to-goodness miracle. Tensions develop between Lib and Anna’s family, as well as members of the community, as she tries […]
When God Gets Lost in Translation
“The Grammar of God” by Aviya Kushner is Ms. Kushner’s experience reading the Bible in English for the first time. Ms. Kushner isn’t an immigrant, in face she’s from New York, but until she began graduate school she had never read the Bible in a language other than Hebrew. When she begins her class on the English Bible, she learns, from the very first verse in Genesis, that the experience of reading the Bible in English is not the same as she has experienced the […]