The Life of the Other

Going over the selection lists of books ordered for the library, I saw that we had ordered Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty, by the Czech theologian Tomáš Halík.  Reading the excerpts and reviews on Amazon, I was intrigued.  Like Pope Benedict XVI, Halik, while he is orthodox, does not shy away from the difficulty of making faith meaningful in the 21st century.

All my life as a Christian I have been caught in the crossfire between social justice and traditional piety.  I find Tomáš Halík tremendously encouraging and fresh.  His essay, The Post-Tolerance Age, will give you a taste.

I watched the Brother Cadfael series on PBS years ago, but I have only recently begun to sample the vast genre of medieval mystery fiction.  I had read some mysteries by Bernard Knight set in Wales and Malaya in the 1950's, and liked them enough to try his Crowner John medieval stories.  I have been spicing my reading with a couple of non-fiction titles, Life On The English Manor, by H. S. Bennett, and Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, by R. W. Southern.

I started a bibliography for a future display, but this list by N. S. Hurt on his Historical Mystery Fiction page is all anyone could want.