From Booklist
C. S. Lewis' 1942 theological fantasy The Screwtape Letters gave us the letters of an elder demon to his nephew, advising the young devil how to manipulate a mortal into falling from grace. Donnelly cleverly echoes the design and themes of Lewis' classic, albeit in two sets of alternating letters. The first set is composed by an extraterrestrial living on Earth in the time of Christ; the second consists of a microbiologist's e-mails to her cousin, a public-school biology teacher. The sardonic spins Donnelly puts on Lewis' Christian message arise from the happenstances that the ET has accidentally invaded the body of Saul of Tarsus, who--unwittingly, in this context--then gives rise to modern Christianity, and the microbiologist is a pro-evolution Darwinian battling Creationist parents. Donnelly masterfully interweaves suspenseful confrontations and theological debate into both time-frames while wittily demonstrating that the worldviews of science and religion aren't as divergent as they seem. Some few readers may find its subject matter offensive, but this is an entertaining and thought-provoking book. Carl Hays
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Letters From the Flesh SYNOPSIS
Two sets of letters, two thousand years apart ... and the one truth
connecting them will change the world forever.
In Letters from the Flesh, the insights
and satire of novelist Marcos Donnelly set a breathtaking pace, tackling
far-reaching themes like evolution, fundamentalism, quantum realities, and the
very core of human nature, all through the deceptively simple medium of two sets
of letters:
ﾽ
the first-century
epistles of a non-physical extraterrestrial trapped in human form, whose
investigations of earth accidentally trigger the rise of
Christianity
ﾽ
the digital-age emails
of microbiologist Dr. Lillian Oberland to her cousin Michael, a public school
biology teacher championing evolution in his classroom and battling the wrath of
Creationist parents
The letters reveal a relationship far deeper than passing coincidence
-- and signal that Cousin Michael's head-to-head conflict with fundamentalist
Christianity may have interspecies consequences that traverse galaxies and
millennia.
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