Timeline Fiction
The Works
Two books that put people inside the ideas this project is built on, and let the reading do the arguing.
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The Longest Table
The first of eight dinners · Two Rabbis
Start reading →Eight dinners, set across time, each one seating people who could never have met.
Why tell this story now? For most of two thousand years, Jews, Christians and Muslims have contended over the same God and land. Again and again, the contest continues, settled in blood. Every child killed for this land seeds another generation of grief and grievance.
The Longest Table goes back toward the root. The first dinner brings together Yeshua, today widely known as Jesus, and Maimonides, a rabbi, physician and philosopher from Córdoba. He wrote to scattered Jewish communities pressed on every side by Hellenism and advances in science, and his writing carries the old wound between his people and the growing influence of the followers of the rabbi from Galilee — and the empire that grew from those followers. So we seated these two rabbis at the same table, bridging twelve centuries, to break bread: the first of the evenings in which they fully meet one another.
Two minds that have each gone to the end of their own thinking are put in a room with the friction still live between them. What happens at that table is what this project means by sacred opposition.
Sacred opposition has one rule, and the Wall of Honor states it: honor the stand, not the outcome. Each man's case is carried at its full strength, by the person best able to carry it, and what it cost him to hold it is said out loud. Neither is asked to concede. The evening is not scored. A disagreement held that way, long enough and warmly enough, converts into something neither of them arrived carrying. The heat becomes warmth… and both leave with more than they brought.
This is exploratory fiction: a story that rehearses a way of meeting the world has yet to learn. Each of the three faiths has harm of its own to answer for, and the table asks each to bring it honestly. The rules are the old rules of hospitality. The guest is safe, bread is shared, and everyone lives inside the question long enough for it to change them.
That is why the Longest Table is a dinner table. Bread is broken, faces are seen, and the temperature of the room is set by the quality of the people sitting in it. What the night produces is carried home in the body of everyone who witnesses it.
Tonight the table is set for two; more will be added. There is always an open seat.
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Sanctuary of the Two Swords
Free introduction · Balian at the Forge
Balian of Ibelin is remembered for the walls of Jerusalem in 1187 and for the terms he found that kept a surrendered city from becoming a slaughterhouse. This is the Balian made long before that, sent to a blacksmith to sweat out his insolence, learning the three sounds that would cost him every honor he was supposed to want. The free introduction gives you the three lessons that taught him how to stand.
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