The Little Friar

Literature, I think, helps us ask questions about our lives and the things we believe, often in ways that other kinds of books simply can't.  That's because literature opens up our imaginations and language to explore the depths of our soul.  To that end, then, I want to offer a list of those books that have helped me to give words to faith, and sometimes even doubts, of my life.  There's enough diversity here that everyone should be able to find some connections with their lives: Voltaire, Candide (1759) Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851) George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899) James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926) Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947) Albert Camus, The Plague (1947) Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951) Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952) Peter de Vries, The Bloo...

I have a confession to make:  I have never liked Shakespeare's Macbeth .  Of all the great Bard's works, King Lear has always captivated my spiritual attention.  And it's The Tempest that I hope is most true, most real.  But Macbeth frightens me -- the way nightmares frighten me. Now, of course, there's a movie coming out.  And make no doubt about it, the movie -- like the play -- asks some fairly important spiritual questions:  What if nightmares, and not the waking world, were real?  What if the truth of human nature were seen not in love but in madness and murder?  What if the love-instinct itself were only an instrument of a deeper, murderous instinct? One literary critic has called Macbeth "a moral play par excellence".  No, no it's not.  Macbeth isn't a moral play.  It's a metaphysical play.  In Macbeth , nightmare and murder are elevated to the level of transcendent realities.  In an otherwise excell...

I've loved Les Misérables since I first read it in high school.  Hugo's vivid portrayal of Jean Valjean's growth into kindness is perhaps one of the greatest in all literature.  Hugo has given us a classic that stood the tests of time.  And while I love the book, my wife is drawn to the play, and more recently the 2012 movie.  But whether it's the book, the play or the movie, Les Misérables captivates hearts and minds for a reason.  So I was doubly excited to read Bob Welch's 52 Little Lessons from Les Misérables .  Welch's little book supplements that classic in so many ways.  And he offers us a little gem that will grace bookshelves.  Unlike Hugo's writing, Welch offers brief devotionals on the story that can be read in a single sitting -- I know I did.  But it also works as a devotional that has weekly readings for a full year.  Either way, these short chapters are filled with a spiritual wisdom that Christans need to hear....

Some days ago, my friend Dennis tagged me in a post on Facebook:  What ten books do you keep coming back to, because they're that  influential?   I've already shared the top 50 books that have shaped me theologically -- there were some novels there.  So I won't repeat those here.   Instead, today, I want to list those 50 novels that have impacted me in large and small ways.   As before, there's no particular order here.  1.  Nathaniel Hawthorne,  The Scarlet Letter 2.  Herman Melville,  Moby Dick   3.  George Eliot,  Middlemarch   4.  Leo Tolstoy,  Anna Karenina 5.  Fyodor Dostoevsky,  The Brothers Karamazov   6.  Franz Kafka,  The Trial   7.  Graham Greene,  The Power and the Glory 8.  Thomas Mann,  Doctor Faustus   9.  Albert Camus,  The Plague   10.  Ernest Hemingway,  The Old Man and the Sea 11.  JRR Tolkein,  ...

Bonhoeffer treasured Cervantes'  Don Quixote .  He believed the beleaguered idealist was an apt metaphor for the Confessing Church.  He reasoned that the church needed "new" weapons, a "new" theology, "new" strategies to confront the rise of National Socialism.  The established state church reflected an old falsehood, a church which had burned its witness at the stake as the Nazis had burned books in the Bebel  Platz in Berlin.  Now, new "weapons of the Spirit" were necessary. Bonhoeffer found all that newness with Christ the Center , focused in Discipleship , expressed in Ethics  and attentive particularly in Spiritual Care  through Life Together .  He was, in a very new way, the Confessing Church's "renaissance man".  To quote Bonhoeffer:  "Here is the immortal figure of Don Quixote ... who takes a barber's dish for a helmet and a miserable hack for a charger"; [in Germany we have] "an old world venturing to...

This time of year, one of the more interesting ideas that captivates my theological imagination is the presence of all those monsters in our culture -- zombies and werewolves and such -- alongside people like witches.  I've been thinking lately about all these monsters.  And today I want to round out this under appreciated triduum -- Dia de Los Muertos, All Saints and All Souls -- with a theological meditation of monsters, hospitality and "the wicked", in which I hope to engage in a more sustained argument in favor of Halloween for Christians.  First, what exactly is a monster ?   The word "monster" has its origins in the Latin  monstrum , meaning "omen" or "warning".  The question really is, then, as a sign and omen, what are monsters warning us about? When it comes to traits of our monsters -- traits shared across time and cultures -- the list becomes rather telling: Aggressive Gigantic Man-eating Malevolent Hybrids Gruesome Atavistic Power...

Kendra and I are huge fans of the musical Les Misérables , so we've been living the dream lately.  Of course, that's because the movie came out on Christmas Day. Again, we're hardcore fans. She can sing every line and every part (male and female) of the musical soundtrack.  I find the musical to be a profoundly spiritual, and distinctively Christian, experience.  (Same goes for the book, which I read in high school.)  I know most of the words to a few of the songs -- but I only sing in the shower. Today is Martin Luther King's birthday.  It's also inauguration day for the President.  These three events put me in mind the political theology depicted in Les Misérables .  That political theology has much to say about today's events. I'm interested here in the contrast been Jean Valjean, Javert, and Enjolras (along with Marius and the other student-revolutionaries at the barricade). Javert and Enjolras could be considered as two poles along a c...