The impetus for this slim, poetic volume was a stranger's correspondence. In April 1997 Reynolds Price received a letter from Jim Fox, a young man who had recently withdrawn from medical school due to colon and liver cancer. Fox had read A Whole New Life, Price's book about his bout and with spinal cancer, and was moved enough by their similar experiences to write. He was also searching for reassurance, or wisdom, if not outright answers: "I want to believe in a God who cares ... because I may meet him sooner than I had expected. I think I am at the point where I can accept the existence of a God (otherwise I can't explain the origin of the universe), but I can't yet believe he cares about us." The letter was so heartfelt and full of "un-self-pitying eloquence" that Price had "no choice but to answer it." His first response was presented as a lecture to the Auburn Theological Seminary in New York City. Soon after he expanded it and released it as Letter to a Man in the Fire.

The questions implied in Fox's letter are simply paraphrased in the book's subtitle: "Does God Exist and Does He Care?" Though Price writes from the perspective of one who believes fully in the Christian tenet of the Holy Trinity, his message and sincere examination of the nature of faith make his words relevant to those of any denomination. Price incorporates, among many other sources, Milton, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Book of Job into his own spiritual awakenings in contemplating God's participation in the fate of humankind. He exposes biblical inconsistencies and apparent indifference to suffering as well as celebrating acts of healing and inspiring mystery.

What began as a long letter written in reply to one person became a book relevant to all. Unfortunately, Fox was never able to read either work. After sporadic e-mail and letter correspondence, a few phone conversations, and then several months without contact, Fox died in February 1998 at the age of 35. Before Price knew of Fox's fate, he continued working on his book "in the hope that, failing to reach its original aim, the text might find some use in the hands of others." To this end, Letter to a Man in the Fire is an unqualified success. Deep thoughts abound in these pages and his writing often soars. Price beautifully appeals to both the emotional and intellectual sides of faith. He is erudite, humble, and wise. He ponders some age-old questions, though ultimately unanswerable, in a moving and satisfying way. --Shawn Carkonen


From Publishers Weekly
In April 1997, novelist Price (Roxanna Slade) received a letter from a young medical student, Jim Fox, stricken with cancer, whose comments implied two simple but powerful questions: "Does God exist?" "If God exists, does God care?" Price responded to the letter immediately with a phone call, and he followed this call with a long, thoughtful letter on the nature of suffering and the justice and righteousness of God. Price admits that he is no theologian or regular churchgoer. He tells Fox that he is compelled to answer the letter because of being a "watchful human in his seventh decade who harbored a similar killing invader deep in his body a few years ago and who thinks he was saved by a caring, though enigmatic, God." Price's eloquent letter to Fox courses through the Bible, Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, Dante, T.S. Eliot and Milton as it attempts to offer solace to a suffering fellow soul. Through his reading, Price concludes, "I have no sense whatever that God chooses to notice individuals who look especially 'noticeable'... the stinking wretch on the frozen pavement, the abandoned orphan... may be of no more concern to God than I and all my social peers." The "steady notice of God" is likely to cause suffering, he says, and points to the lives of Joan of Arc and St. Francis as examples. Price also explores briefly some of the classic explanations of God's part in allowing suffering and finds inadequacies in every one. In the end, Price can simply say to Fox, "I know I believe that God loves his creation, whatever his kind of love [Price's italics] means for you and me." In an afterword for "further reading, looking, and listening," Price provides a nicely annotated list of classic works, from Dante and Milton to Bach, Mahler and Mark RothkoApoetry, music and art that raise the questions of God's justice and evil. Price's letter offers more wisdom and eloquence on this topic than many of the traditional theological writings on the subject. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Well known as a novelist and poet, Price has had a lover's quarrel with Christianity for many years. This letter, a kind of open response to the travails of an acquaintance facing probable death from cancer, represents his struggle with the questions of Job. Price's ever-engaging prose does not offer new solutions to the problem of evil, but many readers will gain comfort and insight from his depiction of a noninterfering but deeply loving God. Recommended for most collections. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Edward Hirsch
...a courageous, learned, intuitive stab at a subject that has preoccupied some of our most profound artistic witnesses and theologians.


From Kirkus Reviews
In line with such cultivated, if sometimes fusty Christian apologists as C.S. Lewis, NBCC Awardwinning novelist Price (for Kate Vaiden, 1986, etc.) calls on reason and experience to substantiate belief in a providential God, even in the face of great suffering. A Whole New Life (1994)was Price's account of his faith-inspiring recovery from spinal cancer. A young medical student, also suffering from cancer, read the book and wrote Price asking for spiritual insight into his own pointlessly worsening state. This short book expands a letter Price composed in response and read in the fall of 1997 before an audience at Auburn Seminary in New York. Price never sent the letter to its first intended reader, who withdrew from communicating and, soon after, died. But the common public, who have now become the addressee of these words, should not scruple not to read them for fear of intruding on a private intimacy of two. The address to the young man is more an occasion for Price to attempt reconciling two distinct voices within himself: on the one hand, a professorial deist in the mold of the 18th-century Enlightenment, who believes with ``the vast majority of the human race'' and with ``most religions''as a religiously inclined philosophe would indeed put itthat God exists principally as mind and that the soul is immortal; and, on the other, a devout pietist who envisions Jesus Christ washing away all wounds. In the end, Price doesnt so much fashion a unified theodicy out of these two perspectives as situate them at opposing ends of theological spectrum on which readers are invited to find their placea helpful, if unoriginal, service. Though devoted readers of the prolific Price will savor this reflection, especially as a follow-up to A Whole New Life, the author's modest demurral at the start of the book, that ``few of its ideas would seem new to a well-read adult'' is doubtless true. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Edward Hirsch The New York Times Book Review Courageous, learned, intuitive...a small book with a large reach.


Book Description
Does God Exist and Does He Care? In April 1997 Reynolds Price received an eloquent letter from a reader of his cancer memoir A Whole New Life. The correspondent, a young medical student diagnosed with cancer himself and facing his own mortality, asked the difficult questions above. The two began a long-distance correspondence, culminating in Price's thoughtful response, originally delivered as the Jack and Lewis Rudin Lecture at Auburn Theological Seminary, and now expanded onto the printed page as Letter to a Man in the Fire. Harvesting a variety of sources -- diverse religious traditions, classical and modern texts, and a lifetime of personal experiences, interactions, and spiritual encounters -- Price meditates on God's participation in our fate. He explores the inexplicable and the inconsistent: the phenomenon of God's seeming desertions and absences in the face of human suffering and, conversely, examples of healing, restoration, and beauty against insurmountable odds. With candor and sympathy, Reynolds Price -- for nearly five decades a serious student of religion in general and the Gospels in particular -- offers the reader such a rich variety of tools to explore these questions as to place this work in the company of other great testaments of faith from St. Augustine to C. S. Lewis. Letter to a Man in the Fire moves as much as it educates. It is a rare combination of deep erudition, vivid prose, and profound humanity.


About the Author
Reynolds Price was born in Macon, North Carolina in 1933. Educated in the public schools of his native state, he earned his A.B. summa cum laude from Duke University; and in 1955 he traveled as a Rhodes Scholar to Merton College, Oxford University to study English literature. After three years and the B.Litt. degree, he returned to Duke, where he continues his fifth decade of teaching. He is the James B. Duke Professor of English. In 1962, his novel A Long and Happy Life received the William Faulkner Award for a notable first novel and has never been out of print. Since, he has published more than thirty books. Among them, his novel Kate Vaiden received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1986. His Collected Stories appeared in 1993, his Collected Poems in 1997; in 1995 he completed his trilogy A Great Circle, which consists of the novels The Surface of Earth, The Source of Light, and The Promise of Rest. He has also published volumes of plays, essays, two volumes of memoirs, Clear Pictures and A Whole New Life, and two works of gospel translation and interpretation, A Palpable God and Three Gospels. The latter contains an entirely new gospel of Price's own devising, "an honest account of a memorable life." He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his books have appeared in sixteen languages.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In April 1997 Reynolds Price received an eloquent letter from a reader of his cancer memoir A Whole New Life. The correspondent, a young medical student diagnosed with cancer himself and facing his own mortality, asked the difficult questions above. The two began a long-distance correspondence, culminating in Price's thoughtful response, originally delivered as the Jack and Lewis Rudin Lecture at Auburn Theological Seminary, and now expanded onto the printed page as Letter to a Man in the Fire. Harvesting a variety of sources - diverse religious traditions, classical and modern texts, and a lifetime of personal experiences, interactions, and spiritual encounters - Price meditates on God's participation in our fate. With candor and sympathy, Reynolds Price - for nearly five decades a serious student of religion in general and the Gospels in particular - offers the reader such a rich variety of tools to explore these questions as to place this work in the company of other great testaments of faith from St. Augustine to C.S. Lewis.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In April 1997, novelist Price (Roxanna Slade) received a letter from a young medical student, Jim Fox, stricken with cancer, whose comments implied two simple but powerful questions: "Does God exist?" "If God exists, does God care?" Price responded to the letter immediately with a phone call, and he followed this call with a long, thoughtful letter on the nature of suffering and the justice and righteousness of God. Price admits that he is no theologian or regular churchgoer. He tells Fox that he is compelled to answer the letter because of being a "watchful human in his seventh decade who harbored a similar killing invader deep in his body a few years ago and who thinks he was saved by a caring, though enigmatic, God." Price's eloquent letter to Fox courses through the Bible, Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, Dante, T.S. Eliot and Milton as it attempts to offer solace to a suffering fellow soul. Through his reading, Price concludes, "I have no sense whatever that God chooses to notice individuals who look especially `noticeable'... the stinking wretch on the frozen pavement, the abandoned orphan... may be of no more concern to God than I and all my social peers." The "steady notice of God" is likely to cause suffering, he says, and points to the lives of Joan of Arc and St. Francis as examples. Price also explores briefly some of the classic explanations of God's part in allowing suffering and finds inadequacies in every one. In the end, Price can simply say to Fox, "I know I believe that God loves his creation, whatever his kind of love [Price's italics] means for you and me." In an afterword for "further reading, looking, and listening," Price provides a nicely annotated list of classic works, from Dante and Milton to Bach, Mahler and Mark Rothko--poetry, music and art that raise the questions of God's justice and evil. Price's letter offers more wisdom and eloquence on this topic than many of the traditional theological writings on the subject.

Library Journal

Well known as a novelist and poet, Price has had a lover's quarrel with Christianity for many years. This letter, a kind of open response to the travails of an acquaintance facing probable death from cancer, represents his struggle with the questions of Job. Price's ever-engaging prose does not offer new solutions to the problem of evil, but many readers will gain comfort and insight from his depiction of a noninterfering but deeply loving God. Recommended for most collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/98.] Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Robert Wilson - WQ: The Wilson Quarterly

...Price makes no more serious argument for God's existence than that "my belief in a Creator derives largely from detailed and overpowering personal intuition, an unshakable hunch"....As to the question of whether God cares, price....suggests that our inability to comprehend a God who is less than fully attentive...has to do with our confusing his love for his creation with a benign paternal love.

Edward Hirsch - The New York Times Book Review

...[M]akes a courageous, learned, intuitive stab at a subject that has preoccupied some of our most profound artistic witnesses and theologians....gives a troubled but resounding "Yes" to the question of God's existence....the author speaks directly from personal experience of his own spiritual openings...

Kirkus Reviews

In line with such cultivated, if sometimes fusty Christian apologists as C.S. Lewis, NBCC Award￯﾿ﾽwinning novelist Price (for Kate Vaiden, 1986, etc.) calls on reason and experience to substantiate belief in a providential God, even in the face of great suffering. A Whole New Life (1994) was Price's account of his faith-inspiring recovery from spinal cancer. A young medical student, also suffering from cancer, read the book and wrote Price asking for spiritual insight into his own pointlessly worsening state. This short book expands a letter Price composed in response and read in the fall of 1997 before an audience at Auburn Seminary in New York. Price never sent the letter to its first intended reader, who withdrew from communicating and, soon after, died. But the common public, who have now become the addressee of these words, should not scruple not to read them for fear of intruding on a private intimacy of two. The address to the young man is more an occasion for Price to attempt reconciling two distinct voices within himself: on the one hand, a professorial deist in the mold of the 18th-century Enlightenment, who believes with "the vast majority of the human race" and with "most religions"—as a religiously inclined philosophe would indeed put it—that God exists principally as mind and that the soul is immortal; and, on the other, a devout pietist who envisions Jesus Christ washing away all wounds. In the end, Price doesn't so much fashion a unified theodicy out of these two perspectives as situate them at opposing ends of theological spectrum on which readers are invited to find their place—a helpful, if unoriginal, service. Though devoted readers of the prolificPrice will savor this reflection, especially as a follow-up to A Whole New Life, the author's modest demurral at the start of the book, that "few of its ideas would seem new to a well-read adult" is doubtless true. .