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Title: The Angel and Other Stories by Sue Stauffacher, Leonid Gore ISBN: 0-8028-5203-3 Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $20.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Touched by a Unique Book
Comment: While the author, Ms. Sue Stauffacher, and the illustrator, Leonid Gore, need no introduction to fans of children's literature, the book, "The Angel," does. This book needs an introduction because it defies the categories the general public often uses in approaching and blithely dismissing the importance of children's literature and the presence of a human religious impulse. To those in the secular press, the stories will be measured by references to God and the sacred. To those in the Christian press, the stories will be measured by the ability of the reviewer to twist them into doctrinal conformity. Neither will understand the genius of this book, which is evident when one engages the stories and the illustrations for what they are: a beautiful presentation of the holy in life and the capacity of children to open up that sacredness.

This is a book for parents to read with their children; especially if one has found organized religion to be largely too impersonal or not to possess a genuine wonder for existence. It is also a book for those who want to pass on to their children a depth of understanding and appreciation for the capacity of good narrative to lure a reader into becoming a walking companion with the characters of a story. Each story is a journey through the emotional landscape of human existence, and the destination of each story becomes the hope that is born through human thought and deed.

This is a religious book, although not by the standards of our time. To our time religion is believed in or rejected as a matter of doctrinal purity. It is understood too narrowly. Not so with these stories. Because of their origin as folk tales and through Ms. Stauffacher's sensitive retelling and Mr. Gore's mesmerizing illustrations, they are aimed at the deepest bonds of affection that exist between us: those bonds that enfold us with love. These stories are aimed deeper than religion or irreligion, belief or rejection of belief, for they are aimed at the soul, the human religious impulse. When I first read these stories I thought their aim placed them within the tradition of liberal religion. This tradition is best summed up in the words of 19th century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (from whom Abraham Lincoln borrowed the phrase, "Of the people, by the people, and for the people," when in his Gettysburg Address Lincoln was seeking to evoke the human religious impulse that linked North and South, black and the white, and man and woman in a common destiny). Parker called upon something deeper than doctrine or belief, or the absence thereof; a mystic chord within human nature and existence that he called "pure Religion," "the divine life of the soul... The only creed it lays down is the great truth which springs up spontaneous in the holy heart -- there is a God. The only form it demands is a divine life; doing the best thing, in the best way, from the highest motives.... Its sanction is the voice of God in your heart; the perpetual presence [which] made us and the stars over our head... All this is very simple; a little child can understand it; very beautiful, the loftiest mind can find nothing so lovely... so well summed up in the command, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind -- thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself'... not a system of doctrines, but rather a method of attaining oneness with God." (All quotations from "The Transient and Permanent in Christianity," Theodore Parker, 1842)

This will make an excellent holiday gift because it conveys, through story and picture what so many holiday classics convey: that life contains enough wonder and surprise to fall in love with!

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