Sunday Salon ~ junk mail edition

I was re-reading Barbara Brown Taylor's Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (2006) and laughed when I came across this on page 168:

"I looked at life through the windows of the church, using the language I had learned there not only to describe what I saw but also to make sense of it.  My context was so tightly focused that even my junk mail was Christian."

I laughed because I remember Christian junk mail I received when I was the pastor at Forrest Avenue United Methodist Church.  Spelling out the whole denominational name gets tedious, so churches often condense "United Methodist Church" to a simple UMC.  Someone misunderstood and sent me junk mail addressed to "Mr. Forrest Ave Umc."  Ha!  I wonder how they thought "his" last name was pronounced.  I re-read the book and rated it 9 of 10 both times, an excellent book.

ON ORDER

The Returned ~ by Jason Mott, 2013, fiction

Harold and Lucille Hargrave's lives have been both joyful and sorrowful in the decades since their only son, Jacob, died tragically at his eighth birthday party in 1966. In their old age they've settled comfortably into life without him, their wounds tempered through the grace of time…. Until one day Jacob mysteriously appears on their doorstep — flesh and blood, their sweet, precocious child, still eight years old. All over the world people's loved ones are returning from beyond. No one knows how or why this is happening, whether it's a miracle or a sign of the end. Not even Harold and Lucille can agree on whether the boy is real or a wondrous imitation, but one thing they know for sure: he's their son. As chaos erupts around the globe, the newly reunited Hargrave family finds itself at the center of a community on the brink of collapse, forced to navigate a mysterious new reality and a conflict that threatens to unravel the very meaning of what it is to be human.

Having ordered this, based on what I read in a book blogger review and on a couple of other sites, now I'll ask you what you think.  Have you read it?  Does it sound as interesting to you as it does to me?

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