"The Word Made Flesh" represents the fourth, and final, installment of a four book series chronicling the life, and maturation, of Dan Kristich. In "Around the Horn," built on the metaphor of baseball and set in Butte, Montana, in 1949 -- The Richest Hill on Earth -- Dan is a five-year-old boy alive with wonder and fascinated by the majesty of baseball. Butte's Clark Park seems to be an enchanted world where heroes throw, hit and run "around the horn," In"The Purple Bow,"also set in Butte but this time in 1962, Dan is a seventeen-year-old high school senior awakened to the wonders, and possible life-changing effects, of manned space exploration. Brother Kelley, his senior English teacher at Butte's Boys Central High School, an all-male school operated by the Irish Christian Brothers, helps awaken his curiosity. What if manned space exploration fails to discover the "next world" identified in his Baltimore Catechism? What do we do then? In "The Magic Show," set in 1973 in Spokane, Washington, Dan is a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student at the Jesuits' Gonzaga University. Standing on the edge of despair and now convinced there is no "next world," he embarks on a night journey of exploration and discovery, through Spokane's tavern world, with his friend, Charlie. He is searching for truth and inspiration and feels that if it can live in this "Valley of Ashes," it can live anywhere. By 1984 Dan finds himself, married with two children and at the age of forty, teaching English in Tacoma, Washington, at the Jesuits' Loyola High School. In "The Word Made Flesh" he realizes he lives at odds with the "new" Catholic Church, the Jesuit high school that employs him and the social order supported by both. Living with this conflict, but inspired by discoveries associated with his night journey of ten years ago and supported by the literature he is entrusted to teach, Dan -- unintentionally -- ends up creating "a school within a school." Through Dan's character "The Word Made Flesh" reveals the essence of this unintentional school and, in the process, emphasizes the then still-undiscovered noble essence of the individual human being. Why can't the "Word" made "Flesh," he asks himself, live in anyone?