I consider myself very lucky that I discovered Justin Cronin’s “The Passage” series only last summer, so the wait for City of Mirrors was much less painful and dramatic than it would have been if I’d been reading in real time: The Passage was published in 2010 and The Twelve in 2012. City of Mirrors came out four weeks ago. That’s not on a George R. R. Martin level, but still could have been a brutal wait for me. Whew! I love this series. I […]
A Grounded Story of Faith and Doubt and…Aliens
Author Mary Doria Russell is a paleoanthrolpolgist, as well as an adherent to Judaism. However, she grew up Catholic, renounced her faith as a teenager, and took up her current faith when she had children and was trying to figure out what she wanted to pass on to her children. Her professional and spiritual background put her in an interesting position to create a cerebral, unique work of speculative science fiction. The Sparrow is equally engaging and horrifying. I wanted to put it down, but I […]
An interesting, academic glimpse at intersex issues connected with theology.
As you all know, I’ve been working on expanding my scholarly reading in LGBT issues and arguments, so that I can help non- or not-yet-affirming Christian students in their own breadth of knowledge. I decided that I needed to move towards the + in the LGBT+ acronyms, and so this book was checked out from the library. I haven’t read too much on intersex issues, apart from an interesting I.W. Gregorio novel I had read last year, so I thought it would be important to […]
Giving voice to the silenced
I faintly remember the reporting of the Catholic Church scandal in Boston back in 2002, but I definitely have seen the aftershocks in many churches beyond the Catholic faith having to deal with sexual assault scandals and the inability of the churches to protect their parishioners from molestation and assault. Therefore, I was highly interested when the movie Spotlight was released and then won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2015. One of my students had read the book Betrayal for his book/movie project, and […]