Review of Where Love Is, There God Is Also
Where Love Is, There God Is Also (Leo Tolstoy, compiled by Lawrence Jordan, Fleming H. Revell, 2001, 93 pages, cloth), serves as a powerful introduction to Leo Tolstoy’s (1828-1910) gospel-based short stories for those familiar with his earlier works, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and his wider array of short stories with a secular focus, as well as for those whose literary wanderings exclude the great Russian. The book contains three short stories, “Where Love Is, There God Is Also,” “The Three Hermits,” and “What Men Live By,” each written by Tolstoy after he had renounced his earlier works as “products of an idle brain.” These stories give us an understanding of the practicality of Christ’s teachings for daily living. They remind us, through direct confrontation with Tolstoy’s brutally honest prose, that to be faithful to Jesus Christ we must move beyond mere mental and verbal assent to His teachings into the realm of assent and practice, of faith and works. This key but oft-negl