“The life of grace is not an effort on our part to achieve a goal we set ourselves. It is a continually renewed attempt simply to believe that someone else has done all the achieving that is needed and to live in relationship with that person, whether we achieve or not. If that doesn’t seem like much to you, you’re right: it isn’t. And, as a matter of fact, the life of grace is even less than that. It’s not even our life at all, but the life of that Someone Else rising like a tide in the ruins of our death.”
? Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace
Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace
by: Robert Farrar Capon
publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, published: 1996-12-31
ASIN: 0802842224
EAN: 9780802842220
sales rank: 147131
price: $17.46 (new), $14.15 (used)
Picture a college town in the mid-1970s. An English professor who has become an expert in extramarital dalliances is smitten by one of his graduate students. They meet for lunch around noon, and before three they make declarations of love. Is it possible that their subsequent affair could ultimately teach us something about true forgiveness and the radical meaning of grace? Only Robert Farrar Capon would have the audacity – and the authorial skill – to fashion such a tale. It has taken well over a decade for Between Noon and Three to appear in this, its original form. First published under two separate titles with significant parts excised and an entire section recast, the real Between Noon and Three is actually a trilogy of intertwined tales, each of which exhibits Capon’s persistent insistence on the outrageous nature of grace. The original manuscript is here printed in full, including a new introduction by Capon on the work’s unusual history.