The Team Player: A Story

Bishop Jeremy Smallwood was so practiced at nodding and smiling that he could have taken a nap while he listened.

Mrs. Brightman-Pennington, referred by many except to her face as Bright Penny, was talking. Droning, in fact, her voice acting like a sedative, a very harsh sedative, as if she could simultaneously put a listener to sleep while dragging sharp nails down his arms. Her voice had an irritating, vaguely condescending quality that, if their meeting exceeded the allotted 30 minutes, Smallwood knew would drive him to a criminal act.

His mind stuck on that phrase – criminal act – and he nearly jumped up from his chair. Instead, he calmed himself, offering a platitude here, a cliché there, anything to avoid alerting Bright Penny that he was coming unglued and his life, so carefully cultivated and constructed, was beginning to unravel.

With each of his nods or comments, Bright Penny would smile and continue to talk. 

He didn’t want to listen. Not today. All he wanted to do was to run to his Mini in the cathedral parking lot, drive to the Bristol airport, and hop a plane to Brussels. From Brussels, he would promptly lose himself, somewhere in Europe. Anywhere. His French was tolerable enough; he could find a village in Belgium or perhaps Provence.

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

Photograph by Kiwihug via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Church questions

After John 17: 20-23

What is more beautiful:

the stained glass

or the light

that shines through it?

What is more important:

the stained glass

or the light

that filters through it?

Can we see the light

without the stained glass,

or can we understand the glass

without the light?

Are we the stained glass

that filters the light, that

allows the beauty of the light

to be seen, to be known?

Photograph by Michael Fruehmann viaUnsplash. Used with permission.

"On Reading Well" by Karen Swallow Prior

It was my great blessing to have had excellent English teachers from seventh grade through college. They each had a gift of teaching, but they each also had a passion for what they were teaching. They took me behind the story so that I could see it was a story, yes, but it was also a lesson about life, an inspiration, a pathway of imagination, a structure through which poured ideas, beliefs, assertions, and principles.

And this was fiction I’m talking about.

I saw courage and struggle in The Old Man and the Sea. I found basic ideas of good and evil in Great Expectations and David Copperfield. I learned about pride and ambition in Julius Caesar. I was taught about people and race in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I fought against impossible odds and experienced what it meant to be the odd man out in Don Quixote. And I read in The Canterbury Tales that human nature was the same in the 20^th(and 21^st) century as it was in the 14^th.

My English teachers have an heir. Her name is Karen Swallow Prior. She teaches at Liberty University in Virginia. She’s published several works, including Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (2012) and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More, Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (2014). And she’s just published On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Saturday Good Reads

What’s old is new again. In the days of the Roman Empire, Christianity was forbidden and periodically persecuted for a variety of reasons. The most common reason was “atheism,” because Christians would not worship the emperor. Michael Kruger at Canon Fodder has the details, and he notes what happens when Christians refuse to worship the cultural gods (not that he’s drawing any contemporary comparisons). 

Stewart MacAlpine has an issue with Christian book marketing, and how we Christians are under a constant barrage of books explaining how to unlock the true meaning of the faith that’s been lost in the mists of time. The latest is Andy Stanley’s Irresistible(and this is likely the least of Andy Stanley’s problems).

If I watched “The Wizard of Oz” once as a child, I watched it dozens of times – every time it came on television. But the movie has a back story, and it’s rather ugly, says Peggy Rosenthal at Image Journal.

There are still descendants of French Huguenots who worship at Canterbury Cathedral – in French, reports the BBC. And you may know the parable from the Gospel of Luke about the Good Samaritan, but did you know there are still Samaritans living in the Holy Land?  The BBC has that story, too (Hat tip for both links: J of India). 

The Catholic Church has been taking it on the chin lately, in some cases deservedly so. But there are some good things happening, too. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia recently spoke at the Salinas Men’s Conference, and he had something valuable to say about why men matter.

Early library

Is it Trumpian deplorables, backwater rednecks, and fire breathing evangelicals from whom academics have the most to fear? No, it’s their own colleagues. Theodore Hill at Quillette tells a story in which academic colleagues, scientific journal publishers, and even the National Science Foundation act disgracefully. 

The first circulating library was established in England in 1728. It’s no surprise – literacy rates were rising but the cost of books was high (how about a novel for $240?). Maria Grace at English Historical Fiction Authors describes how the circulating library arose.

More Good Reads

British History

Winchcombe and its Royal Connections – Annie Whitehead at English Historical Fiction Authors.

Faith

Hidden Gems – Nathan Young at New Life Middleborough Church.

Poetry

Randburg Harriers Road Race – Joe Spring.

Donald Hall, 1928-2018 – Ernest Hilbert at The New Criterion.

Cyrillona – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

First Listen: Helen Sung, “Snug with Words” (a collaboration with Dana Gioia – NPR. 

Writing and Literature

Searching for Walker Percy – Caroline Roberts at The Acton Institute.

Paul Scott’s “Raj Quartet”: The English “War and Peace” – Eva Brann at The Imaginative Conservative.

Art and Photography

Upon the Water – Tim Good at Photography by Tiwago.

Never Enough from The Greatest Showman – Peter Hollens

Painting: Girl Reading at a Window, oil on canvas by Gwen John (1911); Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Oneness

After John 17:20-23

They will know who

we are, by our love;

we know and understand

that, we have for a long time. 

But there’s more: 

they will know where

we come from, by our oneness,

our unity, our wholeness. 

Because that oneness stands as 

the signpost, they reach past

to the one who erected

the sign. They do know who

we are by our love, and 

they know where we come from

by our oneness.

Photograph by Annie Spratt via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"Ten Years Gone" by Jonathan Dunsky

Israel Noir. 

It may be a new mystery sub-genre.

D.A. Mishani has his Avraham Avraham police detective novels, set in contemporary Tel Aviv. And now Jonathan Dunksy has published a series of Tel-Aviv-based novels, but with a private investigator as the protagonist and set in the early years of Israel’s modern history, when both the Holocaust and the recently concluded war with the Arab nations hanging heavy over the country.

The first in the series is Ten Years Gone.

It’s 1949, and private eye Adam Lapid spends a good portion of each day at Greta’s Café in Tel Aviv, drinking coffee and playing chess. Lapid is originally from Hungary, where he was a police detective. That is, until he was sent to Auschwitz. He survived; his wife and two daughters did not. And he blames himself for not getting his family to safety until it was too late.

Lapid also uses violence when he deems it necessary or appropriate. He killed at least two former Nazis in cold blood after World War II ended. The Holocaust changed his views of justice. He’s also something of a war hero, for his heroic actions in taking out an Egyptian machine gun nest that had pinned down his unit in the Negev during the war for independence.

He takes on an impossible case. A woman asks him to find her son, the baby she gave to a friend in 1939 who was leaving Germany to try to get to Israel. The woman herself didn’t make it out before the war started but was able to obtain false identity papers and stay hidden under an assumed (and Aryan) name in Frankfort. She’s trying to find her son. But she doesn’t even know if he and the friend made it to Palestine; the British were ferociously trying to stop illegal Jewish immigration to the British Mandate.

Jonathan Dunsky

Lapid talks to police and a journalist, and he’s eventually able to learn that the friend and the baby made it to Tel Aviv and lived under different names. Yet some months after their arrival, they were both gruesomely murdered. It seems a dead end, but Lapid considers his own murdered daughters. And he decides to do everything he can to find the killer.

It’s a dark, fascinating tale.

Jonathan Dunsky has published four Adam Lapid mysteries: Ten Years Gone; The Dead Sister; The Auschwitz Violinist; and A Debt of Death. He’s also published The Favor: A Tale of Friendship and Murder; Grandma Rachel’s Ghosts; Family Ties; Tommy’s Touch: A Fantasy Love Story; and other works. He was born in Israel, served four years in the Israeli Army, lived in Europe for several years, and currently lives in Israel with his family. He has worked in various high-tech firms and operated his own search optimization business.

Ten Years Gone artfully blends history and mystery in a riveting read. 

Related:

My review of The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything.

My review of The Missing File.

My review of A Possibility of Violence.

Top photo: A bus from Tel Aviv to the town of Netanya in 1949. Adam Lapid takes a bus just like this one to Netanya during his murder investigation. 

“Hurt Road” by Bruce Stewart

It’s 1967. Fifteen-year-old Hank Goodman, his parents killed in an automobile accident, comes to live with his grandparents in Crosscut, Louisiana, not terribly far from Leesville. It’s a small town, he’s from Detroit, and Hank is not impressed. At first. But he meets a girl named Becky Rayburn, he begins to grow fond of his grandparents, and soon finds himself settling in. 

But Hank is the grandson of a Taylor, and the Rayburns don’t talk with the Taylors because of a long-ago tragedy. Becky clearly likes him but tells him she can’t see him. Then an aunt and uncle arrive, and with nothing to keep him in Crosscut, Hank goes with them to live in Denver.

A few years and two tours of duty in Vietnam later, Hank returns to Crosscut. His grandfather has died; Becky was married and had a child but is now a widow. One thing that hasn’t changed was Carl Walker, the son of the man who controls the parish (county). Carl gets into often serious trouble as fast as his dad pulls strings and gets him out of it. And now Carl wants Becky. Hank, however, is standing in his way – and that means trouble.

Bruce Stewart

Hurt Road by Bruce Stewart is the story of Hank Goodman, struggling to get past the death of his best friend in Vietnam, rediscovering his love for a girl whose family wanted no part of him, and trying to find how to create a life. It’s a heartwarming, engaging story about small-town life with its goodness, badness, and everything in between. (It’s especially engaging for some like me whose father came from a similar small town in Louisiana.)

Stewart grew up in Louisiana, and for 28 years he served as a Louisiana State Police trooper, retiring in 2009. He was also deployed to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He is also the author of the novel Sing Me Something Happy (2017).

The tension between Carl and Hank slowly builds and then begins to ratchet upward, making for a tense conclusion. Hurt Road combines suspense, romance, and an appreciation or small-town life into a successful story.

Top photograph: The Vernon Parish, Louisiana, courthouse. Vernon Parish is similar to the fictional Lee Parish inHurt Road.