This book caused this reader to examine his own convictions about pastoral work with "convicts" and understand the historical relationship of the "Christian" church and prisons. Griffith reveals repeated institutional failures to reform criminals by punitive and rehabilitative means throughout history.

Griffith challenges the reader to walk the more excellent way of love that leads to the fall of the prison. He calls the reader back to the early history of the Church when disciples followed Christ into prisons in Christian solidarity with the prisoners - a less traveled narrow way of peace that leads the wolves of the world to dwell with the lambs of God.

As a conclusion to his book Griffith brings the reader to a fork in the correctional road: does the reader choose to enter through the wide prison gate to follow the easy way of crime and punishment or does the reader choose to go through the narrow heavenly gate to follow the hard way of loving one's enemies?

This book begs an answer to the prison's questionable past, present, and future. Read the book and answer the call to Christian discipleship. The walls are tumbling down!

The twelve authors interviewed for this book seem to have, with few exceptions, certain things in common:

1. None of them, with the exception of Garrison Keillor and, possibly, Water Wangerin are huge sellers. In fact, I had never heard of eight of the twelve writers in the book.

2. Although having some connection to the Christian faith, none of them are what you would call "conservative", "evangelical" or "fundamentalist".

3. None of the authors want to be pigeonholed as a "Christian author," or be exiled to the "Christian Bookstore" ghetto. Yet they run into the problem of being too religious for the secularists, and too secular for the religious.

Probably the best thing about this book is that it has turned my on to some authors that were previously unfamiliar to me. The downside of that is that the books mentioned that sound most appealing to me are out of print. This book never fails to be interesting, and althought there are recurring themes (the influence of Flannery O'Connor, etc.), there are some suprises along the way, such as seemingly mild-mannered Garrison Keillor's vitriolic attack on the GOP. One drawback is that some of these interviews are more than a decade old. Nevertheless, this book is a worthwhile purchase.

This excellent collection of interviews is a wonderful contribution to both the literary and Christian communities. Each of the twelve subjects deserves a greater audience within these two groups, and most of them discuss the difficulties of crossing the divide between them. For readers familiar with the subjects' work, this collection offers a much needed focus on the spiritual themes and influences of their fiction. For new readers, this collection is a perfect introduction to writers worth reading. If you enjoy this book and would like to continue along similar lines, try The Christ-Haunted Landscape:Faith and Doubt in Southern Fiction. This is a collection of interviews with contemporary Southern writers. Susan Ketchin (who is, coincidentally, the wife of Faith and Fiction subject Clyde Edgerton) is the interviewer/author.