A Mirror for Fools: An Illustrated Alphabet of Religious Satire

Although laughter has been chased out of sanctuaries and chapels throughout history, it has always had a sneaky presence among religious authors and thinkers. John Lawing and Terry Lindvall (who team-taught graduate courses in Humor and Satire at Regent University in the antediluvian age) celebrate some of the more famous and provocative characters who scribbled funny thoughts on religious subjects with a visual exhibition of select cartoons and lots of doggerel. The authors' task is to instruct and delight, to bring laughter back into holy places and to remind readers of the Divine gift of laughter that marks their miserable pilgrimages. Walking readers from the ancient Greece of Aristophanes to the ironic shores of Kierkegaard's Denmark, A Mirror for Fools playfully presents a motley cast who communicated their wit on the stage of Heaven. From the Hebrew prophet Isaiah to the French cleric Rabelais, from the Roman Catholic Sir Thomas More, a man for all seasons, to the coarse Reformation monk Martin Luther, this fellowship of laughing saints gather to mock and tease and whoop it up, all to the glory of God.