Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Ever Mourn and Say


This is not the first time that tragedy struck at Christmas. Two thousand years ago a psychopath who killed his wife and three sons, heard that his royal position might be in danger from a peasant baby. He wasn’t a pagan; he consulted Bible scholars to find out where this king was. When the foreigners he tried to dupe into spying for him didn’t return, he had no way of knowing which child. So he killed them all—every boy baby two years old and under in the whole village of Bethlehem. It wasn’t a large village. We don’t know how many children died that day.

Maybe twenty.

The Carpenter's Son, Sample Chapter

This is the oldest of the stories in this collection, begun in a flurry of inspiration more than forty years ago and revised many times over...