This past Sunday the lectionary reading from the gospels moved things on from Simon Peter's confession of Jesus as Christ (Matthew 16: 13-20) to the confrontation between Jesus and Simon over the direction Jesus was headed (Matthew 16: 21-28) and Jesus' challenging words:
"If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me."
Matthew 16:24 (ANIV)
I've just recently completed Robyn Young's "Templar Trilogy" dealing with the latter years of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and the downfall of the Templar Order. If you want to read my full review of the final episode " Requiem " you can find it here , but basically all three were a bit of a slog, with the author trying to cover too much in any one book. She does manage to avoid a lot of the conspiracy-theory nonsense that many other "Templar" books are founded on, but she does seem to import a 21st century multi-faith/secularist mindset
Dialogues, monologues, sketches, poems, rants, theological and liturgical bits and bobs and miscellaneous other verbal doodles...