Churchy Tales: Cavorting with Grace

Pick up your heels and start dancing because the subject of Deborah K. Cronin’s Churchy Tales: Cavorting with Grace may set you whirling like King David before God’s throne and Moses’ sister Miriam beside the Red Sea. This book makes a strong case for God having a delightful sense of humor and the power, not to curse, but to bless us. But this is no saccharine approach to humor. Cronin’s stories examine key Christian theological concepts such as sin, creation, wisdom, and death. Some of the tales are downright funny and others, as Cronin notes in the book’s introduction, examine life and faith from the perspective of the sad yet winsome circus clown. But all of them affirm the God who creates us and then gives us his most profound divine joke, the dead-as-a-doornail Savior who refuses to stay dead and wants only one thing: to rise up anew into our lives every day.