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Showing posts from November, 2018

Being transfigured with Jesus - a graceful, beautiful, lucid novel

James Cowan, who died last month,  https://www.smh.com.au/national/james-cowan-author-poet-obituary-writer-20181030-p50ctr.html  as described here had a casual attitude to publication. Financial resources, a disregard for popularity, a taste for adventure and a focus on the realities of the sacred all conspired to keep him inconsistently before the public eye and on the fringe of the 'literary world'. A world, that in turn, he never evinced any great concern for, I recall. I have been reading one of his later works, a novel, 'The Deposition'. It is a beautiful work that successfully weaves a credible act of literature with a profound spiritual meditation on the life of Jesus and its impact on the first disciples. It is a meditation that is at once faithful to tradition; and, yet opens up that tradition to a renewed universality. The deposition in question is that of Rabbi Gamaliel, the grandson of Rabbi Hillel, who was the famous author of three questions: If I