Heretic Days: First Reactions

My new book Heretic Days is finally in print.

Canadian critic J.S. Porter writes of the book: "Heretic Days is grand theatre--a drama enacted in Eric Mader's subtle and playful mind. Mader queries, dramatizes, teases, mocks, pronounces, parodies, lunges, and finally burrows down into some the of the most intractable conundrums facing Christian seekers today. I know of no other writer who reads theology so deeply and so well. You come away from his work with a new understanding of play as sacrament. Think of this book as a stage onto which skip Tolstoy, St. Paul, the Gnostics, William Blake, Leonard Cohen, and, above all, Jesus, who makes many entrances and commands the most stage-time; think of it as Marionette Theatre where ideas come to play, parry with each other, bow, exit and re-enter with new masks and voices. In this play Mader keeps a directorial eye on his constant theme--Who was Jesus? How do we come to know him? What does he mean for our lives and, especially, what did he intend to mean?"

And I'm pleased to be labeled an "endlessly fascinating eccentric" by Bradley Winterton in his Taipei Times review. Winterton writes: "[U]npredictability is Mader's stock in trade. . . absolutely everything he puts his hand to is consequently very well worth reading, including this bizarre but intensely readable book." NB: Winterton's review is much appreciated, but I should note he wrongly characterizes me as a gnostic. Though I'd been long engaged in study and thinking about the recently uncovered gnostic texts (the Nag Hammadi codices) by the time this book was published I'd converted to Catholicism. And during the years of writing the pieces that make up the book, I considered myself a Christian, but one on the margins of orthodoxy.

The book is available in print and Kindle versions at Amazon.