For Theirs Is the Kingdom - Paperback

by Christopher Carlisle (Author)

Ben Cabot, a millennial Boston lawyer in the midst of a personal crisis, is deployed to Montreal for eighteen months, where he chances on the Bishop of the Anglican Church. Mired in a multimillion-dollar project to build a metro stop and shopping mall underneath the cathedral, the Bishop asks Cabot to review his legal rights to stop a plan he adamantly opposes. Unwittingly drawn into the world of the church, Cabot asks the Bishop about an outdoor community he has seen after dark in the streets of Old Montreal. So prompts Cabot's first encounter with its enigmatic cleric, Luke Hale. The renegade priest, and once apprentice to a shaman, inspires Cabot to embark on a spiritual journey through the privileged life he is living. But when a young, charismatic American rector becomes Dean of the cathedral, money and greed jeopardize Hale's community, Cathedral in the Night. On the journey, Cabot comes to question the church's commitment to the poor, and to confront the loss of his country's moral compass in an increasingly bankrupt time.

Author Biography

Christopher Carlisle is an Episcopal priest who served briefly in a parish before becoming the Episcopal Chaplain at the University of Massachusetts, where he created an innovative sanctuary of learning, worship and the arts. Open to all, students, faculty, and local residents reimagined religious "faith" across a broad spectrum of disciplines-from biology and quantum physics, to poetry and music, to working with the homeless on the streets of New York. Convicted that for many, the institutional church has failed the adventure of Jesus, Carlisle asserts that only by breaking beyond its buildings can we embark on Christ's life-changing journey.
Carlisle earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University, and graduate theological degrees from Harvard and Yale. Having devoted much of his life to storytelling--recently by way of the "Street Stories" media project with Visionaries, Inc. and aired on public television stations across the country--For Theirs is the Kingdom is inspired by two outdoor communities he cofounded. Carlisle is married, has four children, and lives in western Massachusetts.