The Body and the Blood: The Middle East's Vanishing Christians and the Possibility for Peace
AsThe Body and the Bloodbegins, it is raining bullets in the  Via Dolorosa. Braving war zones, often on a daily basis, journalist Charles  Sennott spent the year 2000 retracing the path of Jesus' life, from Bethlehem to  Emmaus, to write about the Holy Land's Christians. His goal was "to open a  window for Western Christians into the Middle East conflict, to encourage them  to think about the realities of this land, and about what it means if the living  presence of Christianity here should wither and die." On his journey, Sennott  encounters many salty characters and strange scenes, which he describes with  effective economy: "In one Jerusalem parish, there were not enough young  Christian men left to carry a casket at a funeral." Sennott,The Boston  Globe's Middle East bureau chief, believes that Christianity has  traditionally "provided a kind of leavening in the Middle East, a small but  necessary ingredient acting as a buffer between the Arab world's broad Islamic resurgence and the strands within  Israel of a rising, ultranationalist brand of Judaism." His book is not merely a political travelogue, however. He also makes Middle Eastern Christianity  relevant to the everyday lives of Western readers, by showing that Palestinian- Israeli conflicts are rooted in the same social and spiritual conflicts that shaped  Jesus' ministry.--Michael Joseph Gross--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.