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Pastors in the Classics: Timeless Lessons on Life and Ministry from World Literature, edited by Leland Ryken, Phil Ryken, and Todd Wilson, has now been published by Baker.

You can read online for free the table of contents (with all the books they cover), their introduction, and the first chapter (on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales).

Credo recently did a helpful interview with Leland Ryken. Here were a couple of questions that caught my eye, especially for those looking for recommended reading in fiction as it relates to pastoral ministry:

What are some discoveries that you personally made while working on this project?

Writing my chapters and overseeing the handbook entries allowed me to read or reconnect with works that either I had never read or had not read in a very long time.  Books that I now count as favorites but that I would have missed completely without this project include Elizabeth Goodge’s The Dean’s Watch, Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, Bo Giertz’s The Hammer of God, and George MacDonald’s Thomas Wingfold, Curate.  Even when I was already familiar with a work, the focus of our book led me to look at the story from a new angle of vision.  I learned that the minister’s life is extremely demanding and many sided, and I learned that the genre of clerical fiction is much larger than I realized.

. . .

Out of all the pastors and authors that you discuss in your book, which one stands out to as most compelling?

The fact that my answer consists of a list instead of just one item proves my point about the high quality of clerical fiction.  My list of “most compelling” includes the following:  Arthur Dimmesdale, the minister in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Swedish author Bo Giertz; Geoffrey Chaucer, our first great portrayer of the clerical life; T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral; Thomas Wingfold, curate in George MacDonald’s novel.  I was also captivated by the ambiguous title Saving Grace (authored by Lee Smith), a story about wayward Grace Shepherd who returns to the faith of her upbringing at the end of the story, with the result that the motif of “saving grace” applies both to the protagonist and also to the saving grace of God.

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