Craig Harline's Blog

A new review of WBTA by Mike Debowski explains why the book made an even bigger impression on him than his funny book about cats did. Seriously, it’s a thoughtful and nicely-written review, if I might say so myself, and you can read it right here.

The most detailed review yet of WBTA appeared last week in the venerable (founded 1884) “progressive, ecumenical magazine based in Chicago” called The Christian Century, which is dedicated to exploring “what it means to believe and live out the Christian faith in our time.” Including when it doesn’t all go the way you supposed!

I will be speaking very briefly and signing books very tirelessly (no doubt late into the night) on Tuesday, September 30, from 5:30 to 7:30 pm, at Benchmark Books in Salt Lake City. Happily this will be a joint event, so sharing the speaking- and signing-time will be Paula Kelly Harline, whose book “The Polygamous Wives Writing Club: From the Diaries of Mormon Pioneer Women” (Oxford, 2014), was also recently published. Click here for more stunning details and photos.

Infographics are all the rage in publishing, but I think slapping one on a tie, like this one does, might be a first. I’m not sure how much traditional “information” as we think of it (as in ice cold facts and figures) is included, but it sums up the story of my particular book (and maybe the stories of plenty of others) pretty well. And the guy(s) totally look(s) like me, of course. See the Infographic.

The first Mormon sort of review of WBTA, and it’s a lovely one. (These categories and subcategories of reviews could go on forever, like “first review by a guy whose name starts with R.”) Since it mentions the snowy field near Zichem, I’ll include an image here of such a thing. This isn’t the actual field, but it certainly has some of the same features. Taken ca. 1975. Read Review.

The takeaway lines being, in case you miss them, “A fine mix of pathos and hilarity…. An unvarnished, mostly bewildered and touchingly human memoir.” I especially like the “mostly bewildered” part. Read Review.

The first official review of WBTA is in, and it bestowed a gold star, right on the forehead. Yes, that’s what Publishers Weekly gives to books that were quiet during class and did all their work and that the teacher liked. Okay, it’s actually a red star. Still. Read Review.

There aren’t any outside reviews of WBTA yet, but this inside one by Laura Bardolph Hubers (left) was pretty interesting, I thought, mostly because it focuses on what someone who isn’t Mormon might find interesting about the book, or even those who (gasp) haven’t ever been to Belgium. And since I wrote the book as much for not-Mormons as Mormons, and for non-Belgian-goers as Belgian-goers, I thought it was pretty insightful. But then I would say that. Read Review.

This time I’m talking about the pictures that run across the top of each page under the “Books” tab. Every book has a ribbon of pictures running above it, and clicking on one of those pictures will enlarge it, sometimes even magically colorize it. But unfortunately they don’t have labels yet. They will, at some point, as soon as the secret language that makes it possible is figured out. Suffice it to say here that the pictures on a given page all relate to that given book, like this frightening picture here of me in the archive, in 1987 or 88, with the grumpy archivist who became my friend (on the Bishop’s Tale page). You’ll also notice that for a few of the books you can also click on transcriptions of some of the important documents that were used, which makes for a dynamite party game.

I’m talking about the slideshow on the homepage, which the millions of visitors to this website are always clamoring to know, in exactly that word-order. Basically, if you’re a historian of European religion you spend a lot of time in and around some pretty cool churches (no matter what my church-weary students may say), and these are some of the meaningful places where I work or visit, which working or visiting I can’t always tell the difference between, to tell you the truth. There are a lot more than these, but these are the ones I happen to have decent pictures of. So after the initial blatantly self-promotional picture of me as a missionary somehow looking like I’m pitching my new book (go figure), we go to a grainy village scene in Belgium taken in the 1970s, then look across one of the inspiring lakes of the abbey of Park outside Leuven Belgium, then the abbey of Park before a storm (field side instead of lake side), then the obligatory gargoyle on the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, then a miracle-working chapel in a field in a hamlet of Brittany (that I’m fond of mostly because of my miraculous escape from an angry cow while walking across a field to the chapel), then a couple of heartbreakingly lovely parish churches in Sweden (where there are many lovely parish churches), then part of the otherworldly begijnhof in Leuven Belgium, then some very early medieval Christian buildings south of Dublin Ireland, and finally a classic Dutch church interior, in Delft. Oh, and the one here is from one of the many fantastic parish churches in Brittany.