Book Reviews

If a new subgenre could be coined for John Kolchak's book, Next Year in Jerusalem, "grim gospel" would be more than satisfactory. Set somewhere in the arid wastelands between Nikos Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ and Gore Vidal's Julian, Kolchak weaves a Hobbesian Palestine where the life of a man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short, especially

-- History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: goal. What if that nightmare gave you a back kick? -- The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All history moves towards one great goal,

St. Lydia’s is a dinner church. It is an exercise in radical hospitality and a place where I find community here in New York City, a city both inhumane and all too human. St. Lydia’s is grounded in the Christian story of life, death, and resurrection. It is a community that welcomes each stranger as