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Follow Andrew Klavan to a deeper, richer understanding of the words of Jesus. Andrew Klavan believed what he read in the Gospels, but he often struggled to understand what Jesus really meant. So he began a journey of wrestling with the beautiful and often strange words of Jesus. He learned Greek in order to read the Gospels in their original languages, and he vowed to set aside any preconceptions about what the Scriptures say. But it wasn't until he began exploring how some of history's greatest writers wrestled with the same issues we confront today-political upheaval, rejection of social norms, growing disbelief in God-that he found a new way of understanding what Jesus meant. In The Truth and Beauty, Klavan combines a decades-long writing career with a lifetime of reading to discover a fresh understanding of the Gospels. By reading the words of Jesus through the life and work of writers such as William Wordsworth and John Keats, Mary Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge-the English romantics-Klavan discovered a way to encounter Jesus in a deeper and more profound way than ever before. For people seeking to find renewed meaning in the words of Jesus-and for those who are striving for belief in a materialistic world-The Truth and Beauty offers an intimate account of one man's struggle to understand the Gospels in all their strangeness, and so find his way to a life that is, as he says, "the most creative, the most joyful, and surely the most true."… (more)
User reviews
There were times when I was lost in what he was saying. The chapter I understood and agreed with most was the chapter on Frankenstein which I have read and found to be a fantastic book. As he gets into his solutions, he relies mainly on scripture and forgets to bring in the words of the poets to help clarify his meaning. I also found reading the pieces of poems out loud and following the punctuation helped me to understand what the poets were saying. I appreciated knowing more about the poets and their contemporaries as well as the history of those times.
This is a book I believe should be read over and over again to uncover all the layers lying within it. I do understand when he says Jesus can be understood through literature as the lessons he gives are applied in literature. Sometimes scriptures obscure the meanings depending on how good the translator was.