A funny, thoughtful, provocative book, Swords In The Narthex features Neil Foster, a 33-year-old minor league baseball umpire who finds Jesus sitting in the passenger seat of his car one night during the off-season after Neil violated the terms of the Second Commandment.
Neil, who had 13 years of Lutheran schooling but currently is of no particular religious persuasion, and Jesus proceed to have a variety of rather spirited conversations over the winter, including about whether or not Jesus really exists, to why Neil has an 18-year-old girlfriend not to mention why they are having an affair with their friends Jennifer and Nicholas, which seems to Jesus to be a violation of the Sixth Commandment.
Taking place everywhere from small town USA to the finest hotel suites in Las Vegas to Dodger Stadium to assorted White Castles, Swords In the Narthex features supporting roles by Satan, who appears both as a golfer and an attorney, Brad Wyler, Neil's old friend and now the world's biggest rock star, the Reverend Jackson P. Longstreet, who baptized Neil and is trying to get him back in the flock, and Major Howard K. Opdahl, USMC (retired), like Neil a former Marine, who is blind and who provides his own insights into the human experience.
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