Author Description

Foster's Pie Pan: Stories of Grace Abounding in a Fallen World offers vivid glimpses into the lively, heartwarming, sometimes surprising, then again tragic, experiences of specific people (and animals) with whom the author has become acquainted either close-up or from a distance, while encountering a variety of seasons, occasions, and events that offer readers scenes from which to consider their own stories as sacred, and the ground upon which they stand as holy. The cast of characters includes unfamiliar persons, like Foster, Clarence, Elijah, Philemon, Dick, Stephen, Charity, Lucy, John, Tooney, Cromwell, "Woodchuck," and "the Sad-eyed Angel," as well familiar ones, such as Beethoven, Mozart, Van Gogh, Saint Valentine, Saint Paul, Mother Teresa, and Santa Claus. Seasons of the heart and seasons of the year become what they are not routinely expected to be, as "Quiet, Please! While the Fox Is Passing," "The Bitter Frost and the Wild Snowflake," "Cry, Advent!" "Easter at Christmas," and "A Day for True Love" beckon us to take a deeper look at common rituals so easily, and mistakenly, taken for granted. The author summons us to a field where African American slaves till the soil and tend the tobacco leaf; takes us into the hazardous waters of the Caribbean in which the captain of a fragile wooden vessel navigates his passengers through a precarious midnight voyage; leads us through a backroads settlement in the rural piedmont of Virginia, as well as into a retreat center high in the mountains of western North Carolina, in quest of "the treasure buried in all events." He speaks to us during the rite of passage of a high school graduation ceremony. Not least, he commends us into the humbling company of Saint Paul as together we go into the interior regions of Asia Minor and the "screeching, screaming city of Ephesus with its ghettoes, ghouls, goblins, and gibberish," as forerunner to our coming s