Miriam’s husband worries all the way home that they have been secretly baptized into the Catholic church. As she is being wheeled out at the end of the week, a Catholic priest prays for her and her husband and rubs a little holy water on both of their foreheads. Miriam, one of the members of Harmony Friends Meeting, has to go to the hospital for a week. Wodehouse story, with a constant smile on one’s face and with anticipation of reading more the next day. And in both books, each story usually ends with a moral, such as this one from “Better Late than Never!” (about the sermon on gratitude Gulley wished he could unpreach): “This is the irony of gratitude-we’re often less inclined to express it when, in retrospect, it is the most deserved.”īoth books are lighthearted and humorous-one reads them as one does a P.G. Neely in Home to Harmony, who made the purchaser of his house-the new Quaker minister-promise not to paint the dining room wall so as not to cover the height markers of the Neely children. In both books, Gulley tells about memorable individuals, such as Charley in Porch Talk, the hardware store owner who dispenses hardware-type advice with your purchase at his store (“You will have to do that extra tight”), and Dr. Even though Home to Harmony is fiction, it feels as realistic as the stories in Porch Talk. Two examples are his Porch Talk, which contains thirty sketches describing some of his experiences as a Quaker pastor, and Home to Harmony, a novel, which contains 24 loosely connected stories from the experiences of Sam Gardner, a Quaker minister.
Philip Gulley, one of the speakers at this summer’s EEWC conference in Indianapolis, “A Place at the Table,” has not only written books about theology (such as those described in the preceding review) but is also an engaging story teller. New York: HarperCollins, HarperSanFrancisco, 2002. New York: Harper Collins, HarperOne, 2007
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