"The Searchers" by Joseph Loconte

"So it was, while they conversed and reasoned, that Jesus Himself drew near and went with them."

Luke 24:15

I received Joseph Loconte's book "The Searchers" from Booksneeze.com in return for this unbiased review. I received no other remuneration for this review and the opinions expressed herein are completed my own.

In this well-written treatise, Joseph Loconte, an Asssociate Professor at King's College in New York City, elucidates the dilemma of faith.  Loconte writes with a historian's pen and a poet's heart as he travels the road to Emmaus alongside the two disillusioned followers and the stranger revealed to be Christ.  It seems that it is a quite human reaction to seek to return to the familiar-- to go home, as it were, when our lives seemingly crumble.  This is where faith meets our own realities, and the place that we find that Christ will not let us slip out of His hand.  Every person's faith walk is a journey beginning at varying places, but end in the realization that Christ is Who He says He is and that He came to bring us life.  Each of us will know the truth eventually, it is God's will that this realization will be in relationship with Him.  Loconte quotes C.S. Lewis regarding this human desire, "Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off. . . is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation" (Loconte 2012, 145).  The Searchers speaks to this longing and is a valuable read for believers and non-believers alike.
Rev. Patti Harrison