"The Prodigal of Leningrad" by Daniel Taylor

I’m trying to remember when I first became interested in Russian history. Most likely, when I was 10, and one of my Christmas presents (my mother knew me) was a Horizon Caravel book entitled Russia Under the Czars. I must have read it a dozen times. And I still have it. 

My senior year in high school, I discovered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward, and The First Circle. In college, I took two semesters of Russian history, and I was glad I knew more about Russia’s past than most people. The professor was a great lecturer; he was also an unapologetic defender of the Soviet regime. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

Is Carney’s Davos sermon the way forward? – David Robertson at Christian Today.

 

Only Mozart – Joseph Sobran at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

How Holocaust Denial Became Mainstream – Simon Sebag Montefiore at The Free Press.

“Do We Not Bleed?” by Daniel Taylor

Amateur (and accidental) detective Jon Mote seemingly has hung up his gumshoes and taken a position at the residence home where his sister Judy is now living. He’s separated from his wife, Zillah, and she’s sent him divorce papers. He’s now a housemaster for Judy and five other special needs adults, who are turning out to be less trouble than the staff who actually run the place.

Previously (chronicled in Death Comes for the Deconstructionist), Jon was asked by the widow to look into the death of a professor. He found himself navigating how college literature is taught in universities (as in, there’s little of it being taught at all). Now he’s contending with the doublespeak of contemporary psychology and residence home administration, and finding that the residents are considered not so much people as they are clients.

Fortunately, the residents seem to have more common sense than the administrators. And then one of them is murdered.

To call Do We Not Bleed? by Daniel Taylor a murder mystery is to do it an injustice. It is that, but it is also far more. Jon Mote is something of an everyman, a spiritual pilgrim, a lapsed Baptist still be chased by his faith, a sister who loves Jesus, and his perceptive insights into the human condition. Including his own human condition.

Daniel Taylor

Slowly Jon comes to understand the humanity of his “Specials,” as he calls them, but also that they have intrinsic value as human beings. They are not less than “normals,” although they’re continually compared to them. They are valuable and valued creations of God.

Slowly, too, does Jon comes to address and solve the mystery. In fact, it is his residents who put the pressure on to do something. One of those residents is Bonita, who may rank as one of the great comic characters of contemporary fiction. (Don’t get in her way, and especially don’t stand between her and her bottle of soda pop.)

Taylor is the author of The Skeptical Believer, Tell Me a Story, Creating a Spiritual Legacy, The Myth of Certainty and several other books. He’s contributed to Bible translations and is co-founder of The Legacy Center, created to help families and individuals find their stories, values and meaning. He’s also a contributing editor for Christianity Today’s Books and Culture Magazine. Taylor blogs at Neither/Nor: Ruminations of a Spiritual Traveler. Death Comes for the Deconstructionist won Christianity Today’s best novel award in its annual book awards and the Illumination Award for best fiction by an independent publisher.

Do We Note Bleed? is an insightful commentary on modern life, the foolishness that often emanates from so-called experts and passes for professional judgment, and our tendencies to seek answers too quickly, especially answers to questions of faith. It’s a marvelous book.

Related:

My review of Death Comes for the Deconstructionist.

Daniel Taylor’s “Death Comes for the Deconstructionist”

An academic and chairman of the English Department at a St. Paul, Minn., university, Dr. Pratt seemed to have everything going for him – he had just received a prestigious award at which he was honored at a dinner; he has remade the English Department to mirror his post-modern, deconstructionist teachings; he has a lovely wife.  

He also has a stab wound, and fatal injuries from falling from the 13^th floor of the hotel room he was in following his dinner. The police see suicide. His wife is not so sure. She asks an old student, Jon Mote, who happened to attend the dinner to hear his old (and somewhat idolized) professor speak, to investigate. 

Jon is a researcher, still trying to escape his Christian upbringing. He’s caring for Judy, his special needs sister. He’s hearing voices, voices growing louder, and he’s trying to hold a rapidly fracturing life together. The voice may not let him. 

He believed what Dr. Pratt taught; it allowed him (he thought) to help escape an abusive upbringing by an aunt and uncle after his parents died in a car crash. But as he unravels the story of Dr. Pratt, he begins to unravel his own life. And as good investigations go, he discovers no end of people who might have wanted Dr. Pratt dead, including his wife. 

Daniel Taylor’s Death Comes for the Deconstructionist is a murder mystery, yes. But it’s much more. It’s a journey through how literature (and related fields) is taught in today’s universities. It’s about ferocious and vicious university politics. It’s about a literary theory that is the paradigm in American academia, and the destructive seeds it sows. And it is about a man in middle age, struggling to discover who and what he is. 

As strange as literary theories like deconstruction are, they can have consequences far outside the walls of the university. What Taylor does is make the almost inexplicable understandable, and he does in a context of power, deceit, and politics.  

Taylor is the author of The Skeptical Believer, Tell Me a Story, Creating a Spiritual Legacy, The Myth of Certainty and several other books. He’s contributed to Bible translations and is co-founder of The Legacy Center, created to help families and individuals find their stories, values and meaning. He’s also a contributing editor for Christianity Today’s Books and Culture Magazine. 

To read Death Comes for the Deconstructionist is to read more than a good mystery story. Reading it is also reading what resonates for millions of people who cycled through the American university system in the last 30 years. And reading it ultimately about learning that values are important, and truth does indeed exist.  

Photograph by Anna Langova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.