"What is Truth?" "Who was he, really?"

Starting today, Living the Leap is undertaking a parallel study of the Gospel of John and Tobias Wolff's novel, "Old School." While it might seem that such different texts provide little common ground, each in its own way tries to answer profound questions of truth and identity. While the writer of John has Pilate ask Jesus "What is Truth?," "Old School" asks of nearly everyone in the novel--from the nameless schoolboy narrator to the Holocaust survivor who cleans up after him--"Who was he, really?" Putting the books together prompts us to ponder how our own personal truths, and our true persons, relate to the Christ who says "I am the way, the truth and the life." It makes us wonder whether "secular literature" can convey a "gospel truth" and whether sacred stories can touch the profane elements of human experience. Both make us question why "we shrink from revelation," as Kierkegaard puts it, and encourage us to examine why it is often hard to tell the truth about ourselves. Finally each might lead us to ask, audaciously, whether our true stories, when we tell them truly, can become part of the improbable revelation of the Word.

Suggested Readings:
Gospel of John, Chapters 1-4 (Special Focus on 1:1-18, 3-21)
Old School, pp. 3-60