I’m glad that my family shares at least a little bit of my passion for reading. My oldest son reviewed book one of this trilogy (you can read his review by clicking here), and he continues with his review of the second book.
[Guest book review by Harrison Owens]
Learning and Loving is the second book of the Spirit War trilogy by Frenando Quirós. Over his three-part series Quirós explores the life of Jesus. This book focuses on the time period of Jesus’ visit to the temple until His temptation by satan, and His miracle of driving out the demons into the pigs.
For anyone who read my last review you know I thought it was a very good book. With this book I was much less impressed. To begin with the demons have a horrible language problem. There was also some nudity and multiple people are described as being “perfectly possessed.”
Another issue I had with the book was a theological one. In part of this book it is explained that Jesus received His training from monks. When He returns He tells His mother Mary about having an out-of-body experiences with the monks. Also it is very explicitly stated that Jesus is NOT the Son of God and that His power was just given to Him by God. I understand that real life is not like a Sunday School story but I felt that this book just went too far.
I also feel that this book could be very misleading to people who have never heard the story of Jesus. In the preface Quirós writes, “There are scripture footnotes along the way… but this is neither a scholarly nor a formally religious work.” So even though he does claim this as a work of fiction, someone who has never read the Bible could interpret this book the wrong way. So with this many content issues I don’t think I could recommend this book because I don’t feel that God would be happy with us for taking in this much bad content, even if it’s a story about Jesus.
Craig T. Owens 