Christian laughter is a maze: you could easily get snarled up within it. So says Michael A. Screech in his note to readers preceding this collection of fifty-three elegant and pithy essays. As Screech reveals, the question of whether laughter is acceptable to the god of the Old and New Testaments is a dangerous one.
But we are fortunate in our guide: drawing on his immense knowledge of the classics and of humanists like Erasmus and Rabelaiswho used Plato and Aristotle to interpret the Gospelsand incorporating the thoughts of Aesop, Calvin, Lucian of Samosata, Luther, Socrates, and...