The Gospel of Father Joe
Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok
by Greg Barrett
foreword by Archbishop Desmond Tutu
Reviews
Book Review
The Gospel of Father Joe: rescuing Bangkok's exploited, unwanted kids
The next time you're feeling down on the world, pick up a copy of Greg Barrett's new nonfiction book, "The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok."
The stories of the hardscrabble, complication-weighed lives of youngsters living in Bangkok's dirtiest corners and the dedication of the U.S.-born Catholic priest who single-handedly has built an institution to support them will not only make you feel spoiled and guilty, but uplift you, too. This part biography, part journal of life philosophy will give you an immediate attitude adjustment, especially when you see that all the characters in this real-life story possess an overabundance of joy — in spite of their surroundings.
At the center of the book is the Rev. Dr. Joseph Maier, known as Father Joe — or Khun Phaw Joe — a Longview, Wash., native who came to Bangkok as a young man to work with the poor. In the more than 35 years that Father Joe has lived in the Klong Toey slum in Bangkok, he has built the Mercy Centre schools, orphanages and hospice for youngsters dying of AIDS. Today, he has evolved into somewhat of a global icon.
In one scene in the book, Maier storms through the dining hall of the Mercy Centre and taps fists with the children as he shouts, "The AIDS brigade, the AIDS brigade!" The AIDS-stricken children giggle and show no expressions of the doom that others might see for their lives, Barrett writes.
Barrett, a former Gannett News Service journalist, first met Father Joe in 2000 and was taken with his presence. As Barrett writes, Maier is one of those people who carries a sense of good that spreads around him.
"Beyond the palm trees, rain trees, and indoor plumbing that made his Mercy Centre schools, hospice, and orphanages a shaded utopia in the middle of desperate poverty, there was something else," Barrett writes. "A palpable, powerful something else ran through the small campus, breathed a sense of joy into children dying. Although I couldn't fully capture and define it, I felt it. That ineffable 'it.' "
Five years later, Barrett would return to delve into that ineffable "it," traveling to Bangkok four times to spend weeks with the father. They became friends. The book is partly a story of the two men's friendship, part biography and part a detailing of Father Joe's beliefs about life and the world. It is boosted along by Barrett's writing, which is clear, thoughtful and devoid of clichés. Barrett presents a well-rounded picture of Father Joe — compassionate, ornery and, in the opinion of some colleagues, an eccentric.
The reader gets to know Father Joe as an impish man with a penchant for telling muckety-mucks exactly how he feels, and who hands out coins to the children of Klong Toey. The reader learns the father's frustration with a Bangkok economy of haves and have-nots, with many of the latter forced into lives of prostitution with customers who demand no condoms.
The reader learns of Maier's frustration with a place in which airlines approaching the Asian city — in an attempt to ward people off of Bangkok's burgeoning child-sex trade — feel it necessary to show passengers a short film of a young girl who informs viewers she is not a tourist attraction. There are portraits of Maier's young friends — friends like Boi, a stick-armed teen at the hospice who wears headphones to a radio in which the batteries have died, (hoping) to steal moments of privacy.
As for Barrett's main subject, Maier is no stranger to hard living. The priest grew up in the slums of blue-collar Longview. While attending theology school, he came across an ad for working abroad. On a whim, he applied for the program and was shocked when he learned he'd gotten the assignment. Once in Bangkok, he became obsessively enamored of the people, even insisting on living alongside them in a shack.
Mother Teresa visited the Klong Toey slum shortly after the release of her 1971 biography. For three days, she toured the squalor with Father Joe. Afterward, she told him, "Spend your life working with these poor ... if you can."
Father Joe said, "I remember thinking to myself that if this is what a Christian-Catholic saint is all about, I could and would spend all my life trying to imitate her," Barrett writes.
In the book, Barrett relays a poignant moment in which the father explains his core belief system. "My first promise ... is to the people. When some folks hear me say that, they get upset. 'What about God? You're a priest, for Christ's sake — He comes first!' " he said, feigning hysteria. "But God is the people, and the people is God, don't ya see?"
Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company
See story in Seattle Times HERE
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
March 21, 2008
Barrett, a veteran journalist, records the inspiring work of Catholic priest Joe Maier in Bangkok's slums. Drawn to service in Thailand on a whim, the misfit American seminary student found a calling amongst the Thai downtrodden, even living in the slums himself. In founding his Mercy Centre organization 30 years ago, which focuses on preschool education, the irascible Father Joe confronts the interweaving effects of slum life, the sex trade, HIV/AIDS, drug addiction, illiteracy and orphanhood. In the process he rebukes sex traffickers, Thai government officials and even the Catholic Church.
As witnessed by Barrett, Father Joe is at his most brave when comforting children dying of HIV/AIDS. Although narrating a Three Cups of Tea set in debauched Bangkok, Barrett, overt in his own cynicism, sometimes fails to capture the enigmatic Father Joe with this cobbling of anecdotes. However, many of the stories are memorable, from the tragic (street toddlers, happily schooled at Mercy, later dying there of HIV/AIDS), to the triumphant (Mercy graduates who attend college abroad and are able to climb out of poverty). Reverend Desmond Tutu authors the foreword. (Mar. 21)
See review on PW HERE
By CATHY ZIMMERMAN
The Daily News
Some people are toughened by being poor, some are tenderized, and a few end up finely tuned by both.
That's what happened with Joe Maier, who lived as a kid in the low numbers of Longview's Highlands neighborhood and ended up committing his fierce energy and compassion to the poorest people in Thailand.
In a new biography by Greg Barrett, "The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok," the experienced foreign correspondent tells the story of Khun Phaw Joe, Thai for Mister Father Joe.
Blunt, sometimes profane, inspired by Buddhism, the Grateful Dead and Catholic mystic Thomas Merton, Father Joe has spent 35 years building Mercy Centre, consisting of orphanages, hospices and 32 preschools in Thailand.
Until recently, he lived in a shack among thousands of others built on catwalks above a canal clotted with sewage.
Here is Father Joe's idea of a graduation speech, which he delivers in their native language until dozens of little Thai children are chanting back the refrain:
If you don't have anything to eat in the morning, then go to school!
If you don't have any shoes to wear .. go to school!
If Mommy gambles and Daddy's drunk ... go to school!
... Go to school! Go to school! Go to school!
'Doctor the wound, then apply hope'
Barrett's book plunges the reader into Bangkok's backwater, gradually showing it the way Joe sees it, as sacred space. Later in the book the writer, who visited Longview twice with Father Joe, traces the priest's early days.
Joe Maier was born at Cowlitz General in 1939, to an Irish Catholic mother, Helen Childs Maier, and a German Lutheran, George Maier. Although the Maiers had two more children, their father was footloose, and the family returned intermittently to Helen's parents in South Dakota. She separated from George when Joe was 5, and later divorced and raised her kids in Longview.
Joe never went to high school here, we learn. Instead, he entered a Redemptorist seminary in California as a high school freshman. Redemptorist priests work with the poor, and when Joe was ordained, he volunteered for Bangkok. It was kind of a lark, but that's where he got assigned.
When he arrived in the part of the slum called the Slaughterhouse (Bangkok's version of stockyards), the young priest was so nervous his legs shook violently, he told Barrett.
He found his footing, however, and the writer follows the ways in which the people transformed Joe, and how he returned the favor. His three decades there have focused on caring for the sick and educating young children. Or, as he puts it, "doctor the wound," then "apply hope."
In a phone interview, Barrett said he first came across Father Joe in 2000, while he was reporting on human trafficking as a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun.
Foreign correspondents "just go about our business in cordoned-off corners of the world, and we find these people," he said. "And some of them are amazing people .... but then we get back to work."
"It just felt wrong to me" not to do more, Barrett said. "I thought, this guy needs to be known about more. What I saw there was something totally unexpected. I wanted to tap into it, personally and professionally."
Father Joe wasn't much interested in a book. This is a man who answers the phone by barking, "Talk."
"He didn't want to open up," Barrett said. "He doesn't think he's worthy. 'No better, no worse; no more, no less.' He says that so many times."
The only way to break through was to "just hang out with the guy long enough," the writer said. "You can't BS Joe. There's no way you can get by him. He's street-smart and people-smart."
When the priest finally agreed, he laid down a condition, lapsing into occasional brogue he must have picked up from his relatives. Barrett quotes Father Joe:
" 'If we're going to do this, we're going to do it right! People are always saying, 'Wow, what a success,' but any success I've had is all by accident. Anything I've ever done that's worth a --- I've had to be dragged into by the scruff of my neck, kicking and screaming ....
" 'I might be the thread that runs through your book, but it has to be an honest telling. Tell it like it is, dammit! Tell the truth, warts and all! I'm no fookin' hero ...' "
Joe dragged Barrett everywhere, down the narrow alleys of the vast slum called Klong Toey, lined with makeshift shanties and people scurrying along to tell Khun Phaw Joe about their latest catastrophes.
"He wanted to knock the glib out of me," Barrett writes.
The writer made four trips to Bangkok, staying from 10 to 14 days each time. Eventually, Joe allowed him to see his diaries, which offered Barrett reflections and layers of meaning he had not expected.
The book, published earlier this year, will be part of a series Barrett plans on "prophets, working in the trenches all over the world," he said. "These people speak to modern times."
Through Joe, Barrett learned the context, "the abject poverty, the conditions fueling sex trafficking and tempting mothers to sell themselves or their children and fathers to sell wives and children. Desperation and neglect, AIDS and death ..."
Mercy for the victims, holy anger for the sin
It's not the giant rats and dark hovels that knock the glib out of readers. It's the human beings.
Boi, 12, dies a slow death from tuberculosis, spending hours with her headphones on. Joe "kneeled beside her, rested an arm on her Mickey Mouse bedsheets, and caressed her forehead with two fingers combed through the softest of the soft part" of her black hair, which she is named for -- the Thai word for that silky tuft sounds like "boy."
Knowing she's in pain, Joe says to Barrett, "She is truly and entirely a complete innocent. She has never harmed anyone. Jesus was the Lamb of God -- the innocent one. Lambs don't hurt anyone. They can be dumb and do dumb things, like us, just like us, but they don't hurt anyone."
Barrett also introduces readers to Joop, a fan of "Winnie and the Pooh" who continued studying for exams even when she became very sick from AIDS. "Just look at that spirit," Joe tells Barrett. "That life force, it's something else."
Joop died at the age of 16, just before Christmas.
Barrett does a fine job of keeping the book in motion based on Father Joe's duality: vast tenderness and optimism, balanced by his holy anger, which the priest seems to burn the way others burn calories.
When Joe erupts when explaining Mercy Centre's attempts to help sex workers protect themselves, it's because for three decades he's been watching girls and women die of AIDS because of rape, incest and unprotected sex.
"We damn well better tell them to use condoms!" he says. "Not only that, we better tell them the whys and the hows and the whens ... What a sin!
What an effing Catholic sin to look the other way, to pretend this ---- ain't gonna happen if we don't say so."
Another time, after visiting a sick boy in a tropical downpour, Father Joe and Barrett sit in Joe's compact car near the place where long-haul truckers park for ready access to the girls and women of the Slaughterhouse.
The exhausted priest press his hands to his temples. Next to him, Barrett is taking notes: " 'Take it all in,' he told me softly. 'Take your time. Write it down.' "
'He has a beautiful, Christ-like presence'
Diane Kirchner Nelson of Camas recently read Barrett's book, which floods her with memories.
"I lived most of the time at Mercy Centre, but I lived some of the time in the slums, the Slaughterhouse section," said Nelson, a 1984 graduate of R.A Long High School who went to Boston University, became a nurse and went to work with Father Joe for 10 months in 1989.
"Initially, it was overwhelming. To have no running water was quite a challenge," said Nelson, who grew up in a gracious manse on Kessler Boulevard.
She bunked with 20 orphan girls and young women, and took care of the dying. "I lived with prostitutes, heroin addicts and people suffering from AIDS," Nelson said. "I learned that there are different ways. Americans have very set ideas. 'This is right, this is wrong.' I learned there's a lot of gray. And that's OK.
"It's not better or worse. It just is."
A nurse practitioner, Nelson worked nights in the emergency department at St. John Medical Center before going to regular hours to be home with her husband and their two children.
She has always kept in touch with Father Joe, but reading Barrett's book brings everything back in high relief.
"Working with Joe -- " Nelson took a long pause. "The reason why Joe was so successful was that you saw Joe, and you wanted to be like him. He is so accepting, so non-judgmental. He has a beautiful, Christ-like presence, a warmth, an understanding. ...
"He doesn't just see suffering. He sees beautiful children. Suffering is not always a bad thing. That's when we're closest to Christ."
She said Joe "is not like any priest I ever met. . ... I was raised Catholic, but Bangkok was where I learned to embrace my faith."
A father for a brother
Kathy Maier Roshak of Oregon City, Father Joe's younger sister, went to St. Rose Elementary School in Longview, St. Mary's Academy in Toledo and the University of Portland.
Because of the nine-year age gap between her and Joe, they were not close as children, Roshak said in a phone interview.
He left for seminary after eighth grade, but as the stand-in father for the family, he wrote long letters home, she said. "Whenever we had problems, we wrote to him. ...He was on a pedestal," she said.
During Joe's early years in Bangkok, his family couldn't afford to go there, but soon they made the trek.
Roshak has been to Klung Toey seven or eight times, she said, and plans another visit with her husband and her Aunt Betty (McKee, of Longview) in May.
"One of my first experiences was in the hospice there," Roshak said. "I got to prepare the body of a lady who had just died, a mother who got AIDS from her husband." She took the body to the Buddhist pyre where it was cremated, according to custom.
"I'll never forget it," Roshak said. "They treated her with such respect."
Joe's mother also went to Bangkok regularly, staying for months at a time, Roshak said. Her mother had to curtail her visits when she developed symptoms of dementia.
About the book, Roshak said it's "surreal to read about your brother, and yourself. But it's all true. I've learned some things about Joe I probably didn't even know."
The nurse said Barrett reveals her brother as he is.
"Joe "understands what we're supposed to do with other human beings. ... He lives in the context of being Catholic.
"He always says Christ was the perfect Buddha," Roshak said. "He's best friends with an imam. That's amazing when you think of all the hatred in this country (for Muslims). He really has this respect for people of other religions and faiths who want to take care of human beings. He just gets it."
See story and photos in The Daily News HERE
"... the book is really about salvation, about hope amidst the hopeless, about compassion -- not as some kind of religious imperative but as lived experience."
It's the Humanity, Stupid!
Posted March 26, 2008
Okay, so I'm a bleeding heart liberal, and my heart is bleeding all over again.
I have just finished reading The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions & Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok by Greg Barrett -- a book that has allowed me to put a human face on much that I have read and heard about only through news media before. Nicholas D. Kristof, for example, in his New York Times op-ed columns, has been tireless in bringing the issues of poverty, malnutrition, slavery and child prostitution to the public eye.
It sometimes takes a book like this one, though, to make it real. This Gospel, set as its subtitle suggests in the slums of Bangkok, paints a markedly different picture of this Buddhist land than those of us who have learned from Thai Buddhist teachings might like to fancy. That image would be one of mutual compassion and tolerance, enlightened care for people of all kinds: Barrett shows us the greed and exploitation, the devastation of drugs and alcohol when mixed with abject poverty, ignorance and destitution. He shows us the children racked by hunger and disease, farmed out to the sex market by diseased and desperate parents. He shows us the filth of the slums with their rickety, rat-infested shacks and waste-filled gutters and streams...
But wait... this is really NOT what Barrett's book is about. It's there, unavoidably, a grim social background against which the story of the book takes place. It's important for us to believe in its reality, to "get it" at a gut level -- as Father Joe, the central figure of this narrative, insists the author do. Having consented to have his story told by this journalist from far-off Washington, DC, this worker-priest demands no less than up-to-the-eyeballs immersion in the challenges he deals with daily in his dedication to the poor -- and particularly the children -- of this too-easily forgotten corner of the world.
No, the book is really about salvation, about hope amidst the hopeless, about compassion -- not as some kind of religious imperative but as lived experience. Meet Father Joe, then, larger than life, tough-minded and outspoken, the Redemptorist-trained Catholic priest who embraces with catholic (small "c") enthusiasm the teachings and practices of the Buddha and Islam where they square with his own passion for human justice. Alternately jolly and outrageous, loudly intolerant of all hypocrisy and cant, no matter whether it emanate from the Pope himself, he does endless battle with the prevarication and rejection of accountability that allow such slum conditions to prevail. He is ruthless in the face of greed and evil -- and soft-hearted enough to melt with human compassion for the sick and undernourished children he takes under his protection.
Father Joe runs his Mercy Centre with boundless energy and tireless dedication. The story of his work in the pitiless back alleys and shanties of Bangkok is a remarkable one: as a result of it there are today more than thirty preschools offering shelter, protection and -- most importantly, in Fr. Joe's view -- education to some 4,200 otherwise neglected children. No less a selfless slum-worker, surely, than the better-known Mother Teresa of Calcutta, he earns every bit of the praise lavished on him in the foreword to this book by Archbishop Desmond Tutu -- and the recognition from Thailand's Queen Sirikit herself.
Based on his own meetings with Father Joe, his keen observer's eye, and on numerous early-morning interviews in Bangkok's Lumpini Park, where the priest engages in his daily run, Barrett tells his story sometimes with the objectivity of the experienced journalist he is, but also often as a poet, deeply stirred by the poignant contrasts between the deprivation of the slum-dwellers and the material excesses of the contemporary developed world in which he and his family live. As a skilled story-teller, he leaves until the very last the discovery of the source of Father Joe's love for these children in his own history: "Any success I've had with damaged children," the priest confesses to the writer toward the end of the book, "is because I was a damaged child myself."
What makes the book particularly engaging for me, however, is that Barrett writes also as a truth-seeker on his own behalf. We realize before too long that it is not just Father Joe and the slum children that he's writing about; he's engaged in the search for his own humanity, his own soul, his own understanding of God and the role of religion in his life. One of the key questions facing the religious mind today, I think, is how to justify the belief in a benevolent, all-powerful God who permits the existence of so much evil and cruelty in the world. Barrett finds his own answer in the slums of Bangkok and the heart of Father Joe: it's in the persistence of hope, the boundlessness of compassion, the practice of human mercy.See review on HuffPost HERE
By Joe Tennis
Features Writer
BRISTOL, Va. – Greg Barrett found Father Joe. And then, well, he just wouldn’t let go. The story of Father Joe Maier so captivated Barrett, a longtime journalist, that he knew he couldn’t just write about this priest in Bangkok for a newspaper.
This man’s story, as Barrett saw it, proved to be the makings of a book, “The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok” (Jossey-Bass, $25.95). “Everyone said you need to find this guy named Father Joe,” Barrett said. “He lived right smack-dab in the middle of the slums.”
In fact, Maier’s home stood on stilts, above raw sewage, when Barrett met him in Bangkok a few years ago.
The Gospel of Father Joe reveals how the man Barrett called “the Father Teresa of Bangkok” has persevered against all kinds of odds and obstacles to gradually expand the Mercy Centre, an establishment that Maier uses to declare war on poverty – using only pencil, paper and common sense, Barrett said.
That war included building preschools illegally – without the permission of church superiors or Thai authorities. And, yet, when police threatened to shut down construction, Father Joe would shrug and say go ahead. “But you’ll have to explain it to them,” Father Joe would say, pointing to children, “and to them,” he would add, pointing to their mothers.
The people and this priest gradually built an oasis among these slums – an oasis that includes schools, AIDS hospices, orphanages, safe houses, medical clinics and sports leagues.
“Father Joe is different, certainly,” Barrett said. “He doesn’t bite his tongue for anyone. He can speak out pretty honestly about the Vatican.”
Barrett, the author, is a Bristol native. He graduated Virginia High School in 1980. Now married, with two children, and living [in] Alexandria, Va., on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., Barrett makes his living writing for a variety of publications.
He’s worked [in Washington, D.C.'s Gannett News Service/USA Today bureau] and [at] The Baltimore Sun. Just after graduating at Virginia High, he worked in a factory at Burlington Industries then [graduated from] Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Following a job as a lifeguard in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Barrett worked for a variety of newspapers in South Carolina and Virginia. He was also once the Native Hawaiian Affairs reporter for the Honolulu Advertiser.
Still, in all his years, through thousands of articles, Barrett knew he had found an unforgettable character in the passion of the man known commonly as Father Joe. “There was a lot more to him [than] what I could write on the wire,” said Barrett, 46.
For the book, Barrett said he felt like he was writing a “modern day gospel.” He also figured he had found a prophet in Father Joe.
Yet, Barrett said, “The real genuine prophets of this world, who are keeping things in balance, are too busy to talk about themselves.”
So that, in turn, meant Barrett had to keep going back to Bangkok to not only get to know Father Joe but to live his kind of life – on a daily basis – and experience what it was like to help others in the midst of pure poverty.
“This is a spiritual book,” Barrett said. “And it’s a religious book. And it’s a current affairs book. It’s a biography ... And it’s a story I believe in.”
See story in Herald-Courier HERE
Search inside the book HERE
Finding light in the slums of Bangkok
Reviewed by Allan F. Wright
Catholic News Service
Greg Barrett was a roving correspondent for Gannett News Service in the spring of 2000 when he first met Father Joseph H. Maier, a Catholic priest who labors for the poor, destitute, HIV-infected and children sold into the sex trade in the slums of Bangkok, Thailand.
His contact with Father Joe, as he’s known, was precipitated by the U.N. adoption of protocols aimed at combating sex trafficking. Father Joe was the man to meet in Bangkok if you wanted to know the real situation on the ground.
In “The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok,” the author moves from global and governmental perspectives right into the armchair of a child dying of AIDS. He writes of the Catholic priest who is with them and for them in the slums.
Early in 1970 Mother Teresa, saint of the slums in Calcutta, India, met with Father Joe in the Slaughterhouse section of the Bangkok slums and said it was “as sorrowful as anything she had seen in Calcutta.” Mother Teresa remarked, “Spend your life working with these poor ... if you can.” Father Joe has been spending his life imitating her and Christ who labored for and with the poor.
As grim as the statistics are in Bangkok concerning the sex trade and HIV and a host of other social problems, Father Joe has been standing firm for more than 30 years in caring for the individuals he meets and providing education, dignity, compassion and hope. The medications the government hands out to those infected with HIV prolong life, but death is inevitable for the children, most of whom acquire HIV in utero. Dying has become a “mother and child affair” in the slums.
Barrett writes beautifully about the connection Father Joe has with the small children, the older “street kids” and those suffering with HIV and AIDS. They are not statistics but children with names who need to be loved. Father Joe says, “Yes, I know you were molested; that’s terrible. But where are you now? Where are you today? At this very moment, are you safe? Are you being molested? Abused? Beaten? Sold? ... No? OK, let’s use this moment we’re in to move beyond the past.” His positive, ever forward-looking approach is what these children need to survive and to advance in life.
Father Joe’s forceful language and painfully honest appraisal of the political “solutions” offered by the United States, United Nations, Thailand and even Rome are, at times, very critical. One can understand his frustration at committees and governments who make proclamations without seeing the suffering endured by the people firsthand.
Suffering is, of course, ecumenical, and whoever needs help receives it from Father Joe, whose parish is called Holy Redeemer. However, this priest’s real parish is the slum and it encompasses mainly Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and various Christian denominations.
Barrett, a Southern Baptist by birth, makes a great effort to show the ecumenical nature of life in a slum to the point where any religion is on equal footing. There seems to be no theological differences among Buddhists, Baptists and Catholics.
To those who receive care it matters not, but to the reader it would have been refreshing to learn of the faith that drives this heroic priest. In one episode, Barrett remarks that Father Joe “muttered a few rosaries,” which reveals one of a few cases where the author’s ignorance of Catholicism made his telling of Father Joe’s lifework less complete.
The author emphasizes some of Father Joe’s disagreements with the Catholic Church’s social teachings while failing to highlight the Gospel that Father Joe has committed his life to following. The Gospel, however, is caught by Barrett’s description of this man who lives it out with his life.
In the end, Barrett’s depiction of the slums and of the heroic effort and love of this priest inspires the best of humanity against the backdrop of the worst of the human condition.
Wright is the author of “Jesus in the House: Gospel Reflections on Christ’s Presence in the Home,” recently named the Catholic Press Association’s best book on family life for 2007, and “Silent Witnesses in the Gospels: Bible Bystanders and Their Stories.”
See Review online HERE
The Gospel of Father Joe: Revolutions and Revelations in the Slums of Bangkok |
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While he stops short of calling Father Joe Maier a Christ figure who works a water-to-wine miracle, Barrett makes it clear that Maier comes awfully close. "Water to wine" is the image that journalist Greg Barrett uses to describe the transformation in the lives of children living at Mercy Centre, an orphanage in a Bangkok slum. Most of the children have been abused, neglected, malnourished or sold into sex slavery, and many of them have AIDS. The number of children dying of AIDS and other diseases is so high that Mercy Centre recycles child-size casket lids, removing them after friends and relatives pay their last respects and immediately before cremation. See Review online HERE |
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