On my Nightstand

The Christmas holidays  is not the time to read a book and review it.  What with decorating, baking, cleaning, hosting out-of-state company, shopping, visiting  and all the church events to attend, not much time is left for reading.  However, I ordered it and it came. Not til mid-January was I able to start on it.

To Light A Fire On the Earth is a book I had heard about on Facebook.  After reading other of Bishop Barron’s books, I knew I wanted to have my own copy.  This is not a book that you can read at one sitting, and then go lightly on one's way.  Then when I started reading it wasn’t what I expected.

With a subtitle of Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age, I imagined the book would be about evangelizing God word in today’s world, and it is, but in a different  way.  As I began to read, even in the introduction, it read more like a biography of the Bishop than anything else.  Then in answer, or more as an explanation of the Bishop’s method of evangelizing, it became autobiographical with excerpts of answers to Barron by questions asked by John Allen, Jr., a collaborator in this work. This is a new type of format for me, yet it worked in getting the reader to know Bishop Barron and proclaiming the Gospel.

Throughout the book and at the end, what I digested is that here  is a man passionate about evangelizing people to get them to know the beauty, truth and good of the Catholic faith. He wants to reach them with the positive, find ways more inviting, point to the good in the culture, experience the lyrical in Catholicism.

I received this book (published by Image Books/NY) from Blogging for Books for this review. It has found a place on my nightstand where at night, like saying the Psalms or the evening Office, I can reread a few pages, think about what I’ve read, and delve into their richness as I sleep, so I can perhaps in a tiny way live them the next day.