Theology: This Is My Beloved Son: The Transfiguration of Christ by Andreas Andreopoulos.

After I got back into the preaching rhythms of parish life, it took only three or four years before I realized I had absolutely nothing left to say about the Transfiguration. Which is kind of a problem, since it comes around every year as the last Sunday before Lent (or twice a year, if you’re Anglican or Catholic!). Surely there is more to it, I thought. So I took a deep dive… and discovered buried treasure! My finds are so extraordinary that I’ll be sharing them in my FIRST EVER KICKSTARTER!!—in a book called Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration. Click that all-caps link and sign up to be notified when it launches! In the meanwhile, I have to share this wonderful book I discovered in my research. For me, reading Eastern Orthodox theology is always a surprising experience. It feels a bit like taking brightly-colored shards of biblical and doctrinal material and putting them in a kaleidoscope: all the pieces are recognizably there, but reconfigured in a new pattern that makes you see them differently. Andreopoulos’s extended meditation on the Transfiguration does exactly that. Every time he started to lose me, the kaleidoscope turned and all the pieces shook together in a fresh configuration, still familiar and yet new again. Of all the theological works I’ve read on the topic, this is my favorite.

Cookbook: The Complete Book of Greek Cooking by The Recipe Club of Saint Paul’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral.

Regrets? I’ve had a few. Including a number of disappointing Greek cookbooks. I’m not sure why they’ve been so frustating. I never met a Greek meal in a restaurant I didn’t like, but directions for reproducing the same at home have just never worked, not even when I sourced more exotic ingredients like mastic or ouzo. Well, I should have known that if anybody was going to get Greek cooking right, it was church ladies. This is not your ordinary church lady cookbook but an exhaustive, detailed, and impassioned collection. Let’s just say you never knew how many things you could wrap inside phyllo dough.

Novel: The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius, translated by Sarah Ruden.

For the aforementioned Kickstarter book project, I tooled around in the New Testament Greek and discovered that what we call the “transfiguration” in English comes from the Latin translation of what in Greek is metamorphosis, as in what caterpillars do inside the chrysalis in order to become butterflies, or what bureaucrat Gregor Samsa undergoes one night only to wake up as a giant cockroach in Kafka’s book by the same name. Needless to say, that puts a startling new light on this event in Jesus’ life. It also led me to two Latin works with the title of Metamorphoses—one by Ovid, first made public around the year 8 AD, and the other by Apuleius about 170 years later. Augustine didn’t think much of Apuleius’s version; he gave it the contemptuous new title of “The Golden Ass.” Given Augustine’s history, you can’t blame him. However, if you are feeling secure in your morals, you can handle the outrageous entertainment that this ancient picaresque novel provides. To give you a sense of it, consider that in an early scene we meet a Socrates who did not actually die nobly as a martyr to truth, but instead got trapped by a nymphomaniac landlady and survives on into excessive old age as her sex slave. The novel’s protagonist—who shares the name Lucius with the author (!)—gets himself into trouble with magic and turns into an ass, whereupon he is repeatedly sold, beaten, tortured; overhears raunchy tales and witnesses harrowing brutality; and participates in some raunchiness and brutality himself. I won’t spoil it here, but you can decide for yourself if the ending is warranted. If nothing else, this book will cure you of any illusion that the Romans were a stately and virtuous people. Sarah Ruden’s translation makes for hilarious and effortless reading.