By Scalpel and Cross: A Missionary Doctor in Old Korea is the story of a Presbyterian medical missionary told against the background of Korea in the first half of the twentieth century, decades before the astounding rise of South Korea. Young Dr. Archibald G. Fletcher arrives in 1909, just before Japan annexes Korea. The dramatic, little-read history of early Christian missions is part of the story, as Arch, assigned to Taegu, confronts appalling diseases, poverty, and the scourge of leprosy. The reader gets to know Arch and his wife, Jessie, through their relentless effort to provide...

Five people, representing three generations, meet to share some of their deepest thoughts. Luc and Don get together after thirty years, with their one-time mentor, Jay, and are later joined by Lucs daughter and her friend Ian.

Their dialogues, patterned roughly after Plato, start with Jay asking if death is just the end of life, or if there is more. Does science have an answer? Is there a soul or spirit, a reality that transcends the reality of our scientific universe of space and time? Or is an existence beyond this world and life just the indulgence of imaginative conjecture? Through the...