A minister's wife finds herself in hell. The story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16:19-31 gives a chilling insight into the afterlife. It is a story that is not often addressed because it makes clear the separation of people upon death. Frank Winscott, a retired minister, works at comparing translations of the Bible. Eugena has ignored her husband's work and his sermons all her life. Instead, she finds meaning in her potter's shed, where she makes different forms of...
Crippled in childhood, Mary Wesley, sister of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, speaks of the Wesley household in first-person narrative built on the facts of her life. Mary lived in a strict Christian family, one of 19 children, 10 of whom survived. Her mother, Susanna Wesley, imposed a regiment where «not one child after a year old was heard to cry out.» Her father, Samuel Wesley, a minister at Epworth, could not provide for his family, and spent time in debtor's prison. The...
No Word for the Sea is built on several layers of questioning: What is language? What is memory? Where does the mind go when the circuits shut down? The novel covers seven years in the lives of Solome and Stephen Savard in St. Paul, Minnesota. Stephen is provost at Cobson College, and Solome has raised three children. The events alternate between Stephen's first-person narrative and Solome's third-person narrative in accord with the breaking text of their lives. «Once there was a...
Many towns have their murderers, but are they also members of a church, a Boy Scout leader, or president of the congregation? Could they be trusted to bring a covered dish faithfully to church suppers? This novel takes the BTK murders in Wichita, Kansas, as inspiration to question issues of evil. How could a man commit murder and yet sit in church all those years until he was caught? What is a Christian? What is Christianity? Can a Christian murderer go to heaven? Mark Cabot and Ralph Gheary,...
Love in one form or another is the commanding force of this new collection of short fiction. The Servitude of Love holds the revelations of love in different manifestations–love of work, love of another, love of journey, love of mission, love of justice, of foolishness, of duty. These thirteen stories take place along the north/south corridor of the central plains of America, in Afghanistan and Spain. Fictional characters such as Noe in Brownsville, Texas in the first story, and actual...
A professor hears the voices of Biblical women. She begins writing. What was it like for Dorcas to die and be brought back to life? What was it like for Philip's daughters to live with the threat of persecution after Christ was crucified? What did Miriam feel when she sat in the leprosy tent? What did they all say as the professor wove her own story between their voices? It was Michal, David's first wife, who made a bolster of goat's hair for David's bed when Saul, her...
