Catching Idle Butterflies

Floored!

I'm a member of the Conservative Book Club, and as such I receive emails from them about sales, new books coming out, etc. Well, after receiving another email, I decided to see what other new books were out besides the ones listed in the email.

I scrolled down the substantial list and toward the bottom I saw "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt." What caught my attention was not the title, but who wrote it:

Anne Rice.

Yes, that Anne Rice who wrote "Interview with a Vampire" et al. I knew this wasn't some sort of typical Anne Rice book, otherwise it would not be showcased by the Conservative Book Club.

I've never read any of her books, and assumed I never would, mostly because her books seemed to dark for my taste. Plus, after watching and reading several interviews of her, I knew she was an atheist, and an outspoken one. I honestly didn't want to give her any of my money based on that alone. Judgemental and the perfect display of a "higher-than-thou" attitude? I admit it, yes.

The book club's reviewer wrote in part: "Novelist Anne Rice shot to fame with Interview with the Vampire, the first in a long series of bestsellers known as The Vampire Chronicles. Though many readers found in them a clear, even traditional sense of good and evil, Rice considered herself an atheist. Then, in 1998, she experienced a religious awakening that eventually brought her back to the Christian, specifically Catholic, faith of her childhood. She has since vowed to devote the rest of her life to spreading her rediscovered faith through fiction -- beginning with this extraordinary novel about the child Jesus, the first in a projected trilogy on the life of Christ. . .

"Rice's concluding Author's Note traces the book's genesis to her return to Catholicism in 1993, her voracious reading -- a mountain of New Testament scholarship, the Apochrya, the ancient texts of Philo and Jospephus -- and her passionate search for Jesus of the Gospels. With this novel, she has indeed found a convincing version of him; this is fiction that transcends story and instead qualifies as an act of faith."

Welcome home, Anne.