I finished Peter Rollins' recent collection of tales the other day. He hesitates to call them parables but he is hoping that is what they will be to the reader. "Parables subvert [the] desire to make faith simple and understandable. They do not offer the reader clarity, for they refuse to be captured in the net of a single interpretation and instead demand our eternal return to their words, our wrestling with them, and our puzzling over them...A parable does not primarily provide information about our world...the parable transforms the way we hold reality, and thus changes reality itself." Some of the stories are adapted from Scriptural stories and parables, others are completely original. It's a small book and the stories are very short -- sometimes less than two pages. Each is followed by a short commentary describing what prompted him to write the story or giving some of the philosophical background that went into it. (He notes in the introduction that these commentaries are not meant as explanations but rather as "place[s] of entry for the uninitiated.") The book is separated into three parts, titled "Beyond Belief", "G-O-D-I-S-N-O-W-H-E-R-E", and "Transfigurations."

I left the book on the table beside my bed and read a parable a night for a while, which is probably a better way to go then simply plowing through the entire collection at once. Take a listen to "The Orthodox Heretic" in the YouTube clip to the side and see some other resources linked below to see if you'd be interested in the book.

More Peter Rollins resources

• The Rapture - A tract that I helped Peter prepare (in the style of Jack T. Chick). Although this story is not in the book, it will give you a good idea of what to expect.
• Translating the Word - in which Peter shares another of the stories and spoils the plot of The Book of Eli
• The Third Mile - Peter reading another story from the book.
• No Conviction - Peter reading another story from the book.
• Other Peter Rollins video - A collection of other videos (not all related to this book)

Find the book at Paraclete Press | AbeBooks | Amazon

*Note: Peter has just updated his website with this info: "To aid in this time of reflection I have chosen seven parables to supplement the thirty-three already found in The Orthodox Heretic. If you purchase a copy of the book from Paraclete Press (up until the beginning of Lent – 17th February) you will receive these additional parables. This means that you will have one to reflect upon for each day of Lent."

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination (Elizabeth McCracken) and Waiting With Gabriel (Amy Kuebelbeck) were part of the reading that I did after Cara's death and they would be useful for anyone who wanted to do some reading specifically about infant loss, keeping in mind that everyone's story and everyone's pain is unique.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

Replica deals with two children: the first stillborn and the second born healthy. (McCracken front-loads the book this way: "A child dies in this book: a baby. A baby is stillborn. You don't have to tell me how sad that is: it happened to me and my husband, our baby, a son...A baby is born in this book, too. That is to say, a healthy baby, our second child.") This is the more literary of the two and is well-written, although after reading it Janel turned to me and said, "Well, that's a good reminder not to get too self-absorbed."

Waiting with Gabriel

Kuebelbeck links a number of news items from her site, which are also helpful:

• MSNBC: When a baby is destined to die
  "...But the paradox of modern medicine is that knowing doesn’t always mean the outcome will be better. Sometimes you can just see death coming from a long way off..."
• New York Times: A Place to Turn When a Newborn Is Fated to Die
  "...Traditionally, doctors and nurses dealt with babies born with fatal anomalies by whisking them away from their mothers to die. But in the 1970s, a perinatal bereavement movement began offering parents another way to deal with the death of a child at birth, by acknowledging the grief they feel and by creating family and religious rituals around a stillbirth or early death...
  
  “I tell them this will shake up their relationships with their family and friends, it will shake what they believe about the world and their faith,” said the Rev. Peter Lund, a United Church of Christ minister and chaplain of the hospice program at Children’s Hospitals and Clinics of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
  
  The questions the experience unearths are the most essential people face, he added. “How does your inner life fare, your relationship with God, as this progresses? How do you deal with everything that comes up? And how does that echo inside you?”"

Find Waiting With Gabriel on Abebooks.
Find An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination on Abebooks.

Related:

• Reflections on the life and death of Caritas Anne, our daughter
• Birthing a Dying Child

Haïti, mon pays,
wounded mother I'll never see.
Ma famille set me free.
Throw my ashes into the sea.

Mes cousins jamais nés
hantent les nuits de Duvalier.
Rien n'arrete nos esprits.
Guns can't kill what soldiers can't see.

In the forest we lie hiding,
unmarked graves where flowers grow.
Hear the soldiers angry yelling,
in the river we will go.

Tous les morts-nés forment une armée,
soon we will reclaim the earth.
All the tears and all the bodies
bring about our second birth.

Haïti, never free,
n'aie pas peur de sonner l'alarme.
Tes enfants sont partis,
In those days their blood was still warm

"...Twenty-nine weeks into my pregnancy and two months after receiving the devastating news that Caritas Anne, our daughter in utero, suffered from a massive and likely fatal brain tumor, my body went into labor. Due to pregnancy complications caused by Cara’s condition, my labor could not be stopped. All night my uterus contracted and my cervix dilated. At the appropriate time, I began pushing. Cara’s head, swelled beyond the size of that of a full-term infant by spinal fluid and lesion, would not descend through the birth canal. After I was quickly wheeled into an operating room for a cesarean section, I stared at a partition while a team of health professionals wrested my ailing daughter from my body. She did not cry; she barely breathed. And there was nothing I could do to make things right. I couldn’t even touch my child. While another team of doctors worked to intubate and stabilize my daughter, I did what she could not do and the only thing I could do; I wailed..."

I highly recommend David Dark's latest book. It's woven together from personal anecdotes, scriptural phrases, and cultural artifacts in an entertaining and provocative manner. Take a look at the topics he delves into (taken from the table of contents) to whet your appetite:

From Englewood Review of Books (ERB), who have named Sacredness the 2009 Englewood Book of the Year:

NOTE: ERB notes that, while supplies last, a free download of the audiobook version of this book is available. Get the audiobook.

Find this book on Abebooks.