Dave Andrews

I wanted to alert you to the release of ‘Fire And Faith’, a great book called written by my good friend Kristin Jack, who died a day before it was published, that you could order for Christmas.

I never expected this book to be as extraordinarily good as it is. It was my friend’s first novel, most first novels are pretty awful and I was worried about the review I promised to write. But I was blown away by ‘Fire And Faith’. Once I started reading it, I couldn’t stop.

‘It’s 1563 and Europe teeters on a knife-edge. Catholics and Protestants are on the brink of a war so catastrophic it will kill millions and rage for a hundred years. One voice cries out—pleading for peace and calling for tolerance. Based on real-life events, this historical novel tells the story of Sebastian Castellio, a brilliant theologian, whose calls for tolerance and dialogue in the sixteenth century sparked a violent backlash from the demagogues of his day, including his one-time colleague, the Reformer John Calvin’.

I was enchanted by this exceptionally well-written account of Sebastian Castellio, who marshalled his considerable intelligence with exceptional courage to creatively engage a world at war, in which the so-called ‘righteous’ gave no quarter, but slaughtered each other in the name of God.

Anyone who wants to know what could be involved for us in confronting ethno-religious extremism today would do well to read about the way Sebastian Castellio faced his personal and political struggles and the underlying theological challenges of his day – offsetting dogma with doubt, opposing forces of conformity with freedom of conscience and confronting Christian savagery with Christlike nonviolence.

I would go so far as to suggest that encountering Castellio in ‘Fire and Faith’ could provide the same kind of inspiration for many of us today as Jesus experienced in encountering Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration before taking his final stand in the face of persecution and speaking subversive truth to oppressive power.

You can purchase copies from Amazon, but also from AVID, BAM, Book Depository, Herald Press, Indigo or Koorong