Did you know that Jesus experienced sexual temptation? See below.
Down relates Jesus’s life chronologically, including almost all the details from the gospels and adding occasional human touches, such as His heart searching concerning His identity and mission, and that He had a friend near the Jordan at whose house He stayed several days. Such details help fill in gaps and make some of the encounters more plausible.
Continue reading “That Man Jesus by Martin Down”
The premise of this book is intriguing: Ariel, a Jewish priestess and niece of King David, is sent on a mysterious quest by the angel Raziel. Not to a far-off country, but to a period a thousand years later, at the height of the Roman Empire, and shortly after the Crucifixion of the Jewish Messiah. The customs of the time are savage but an elderly Druid woman with supernatural powers realises Ariel has been commissioned with a crucial task and ensures she is not molested.
This is a very unusual book – both as regards the theme and the style. Two WWI soldiers experience the horrors of war, slaughtering mercilessly and seeing their comrades slaughtered. Each one finds himself alone in the most devastating conditions on a mountainside in the Romanian Carpathians. All of their respective companions have died – accidentally, by suicide or in the relentless gunfire while attempting to push a cannon up the hillside. Neither of them has any real hope or wish to survive. They are starving, bitterly cold, and totally lost among the snow-covered boulders.
Isa and her young family emigrate from the tiny Orkney island of
Raumsey to Alberta, where her parents are already living. An unfortunate young English girl, Sarah, happens to arrive at the same time, destined to marry a friend of her father’s, who is much older than she. The vastness of the prairie environment and the harsh climate prove enormously challenging for the newcomers. Hard work, tight finances and cruel weather strain Isa and Davie’s marriage and he spends months up north working on the paddle steamers.
This book, number 5 in the Raumsey series, not only portrays the horrors of WWII through the eyes of simple, ordinary participants, but sheds a sidelong glance at the morality of a war initiated at some high level, far away from those who are forced to carry it out without understanding why.
Eldredge has hit on something big! He dares to turn his back on the common modern Christian perspective on society (esp. masculine roles) and explore the deep, real motives and needs of men.
His analysis is rather one-sided (e.g. every man carries a wound given by his father P.60) and so is his remedy: accept and live out your desire to fight battles, experience adventure rescue your beauty. Continue reading “Wild at Heart by John Eldredge”
Flame in the Night by Heather Munn is a captivating drama about the resistance movement in occupied France during WWII. Teenage scouts conceal Jewish children from the Gestapo in remote farms, attics, treetops and caves. Meanwhile, all around them everyday life continues as usual: cultivating vegetables, going to school, shovelling snow, attending church.
An informer, working for the compromising Vichy government, takes up residence in the village. Injured German soldiers from the Eastern front arrive to recuperate. The pastor and his assistant encourage the faithful to practise nonviolent resistance. Together they establish a network of helpers, which enables many Jewish children from Poland or Germany, whose parents have been deported to concentration camps, to go into hiding or to take on new identities and mingle with the locals. However, some of the village lads join the underground armed Maquis. And so the agonising questions of conscience keep surfacing.
The prime player in this story are Julien Losier, the eighteen-year-old son of an earnest French Protestant family. His counterpart is Elisa Schulmann (renamed Elise Fournier), the sixteen-year-old daughter of strict German Jewish parents. You guessed: they fall for each other. But this is no traditional romance. It’s all about the heart-searching questions of faithfulness to one’s upbringing, responsibilities and convictions, of ethical dilemmas, and the tormenting yearning for God to reveal Himself amid all this suffering.
Various subplots spice up the narrative. Benjamin fails in his attempt to sneak across the border into Switzerland. Pastor Alexandre and Julien’s father are incarcerated, which provokes the nervous breakdown of his mother. How can two teenagers be expected to cope in such a situation?
This book is superbly written throughout. Munn captures not only the sinister events and accompanying inner struggles, but also vividly describes the harsh scenery and dramatic changes of season, as well as the practicalities of life in a siege situation. One particularly strong feature is the masterly and very realistic use of cropped remarks in tense dialogue exchanges, to hint at things the speaker doesn’t dare to express in words.
Although laced with suspense, this book is not for those seeking an action-packed, racy war thriller. Rather, it will appeal to serious readers, who are willing to come to grips with difficult moral issues and emotional qualms. Some readers might be put off by the repeated reflections on risking one’s life for others, and the legitimacy or otherwise of deceit and violence in a brutal war situation. I found the many characters with unfamiliar-sounding names a bit difficult at first, but the matter largely resolved itself as the book progressed.
This is a magnificent book with a challenging theme. You can buy the paperback here or the e-book here, or at Amazon or elsewhere. Heather Munn has written two earlier books together with her mother, Lydia Munn: How Huge the Night and Defy the Night. They set the scene for Flame in the Night and introduce some of the characters. However, it is not necessary to read them first, as each book is complete in itself.
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candalous rumours and immoral men do their best to ruin May Rose Long’s life. But she strives to remain honest and chaste. With neither home nor money, she even adopts the forlorn wild teenager, Wanda, before realising she is her fugitive husband’s daughter.
The book is well written and paints a realistic picture of the social relationships and harsh living conditions of a logging town in West Virginia’s virgin forest in 1899. It builds an appetite for the other books in the Mountain Women Series.
It’s a bit strange for a Jerseyman to watch a film about WWII Guernsey in Switzerland. As can be imagined, the audience was small.
I was pleased to discover a war film with a difference: no explicit brutality and no sex. Continue reading “The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society”
This charmingly innocent book traces the relationship between orphaned Judy Abbott, who feels she has neither worth nor right to exist but is clever and has a gift for writing, and her mysterious benefactor known only as Daddy-Long-Legs, since he insists on remaining anonymous. Continue reading “Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster”