Divinity School

Maria Leval, a Cuban expatriate, enters divinity school to become an ordained minister. There she meets Professor John Adamson, and together they enter the world of his dark past only to discover their paths may have crossed decades earlier. In combat, Adamson, a former Marine sniper with many kills to his credit, perhaps one too many, met the God that religions strain to hide from believers. In attempting union with this God, he crosses the border between humanity and divinity-only to spend the rest of his life running from the consequences of his Icarian reach. Known to the reader primarily through excerpts from her journals, Angela Leval-Forester haunts the novel as Maria's murdered sister, whose murderer Maria's daughter vows to discover.Divinity School pushes Thomas Aquinas's dictum "cognitio Dei experimentalis" (knowledge of God through experience) to its limit as Adamson vividly tells his psychiatrist the combat experiences that transformed his concept of God. In so doing, he inches toward revealing the demonic act that would have him touch the divine.Divinity School works the premise that a divinity school curriculum is no match for raw life experience in revealing the nature of God and defies the naive notion that spiritual enlightenment is a wholly desirable experience. The novel is especially relevant as shattered men and women return to their homeland bringing with them the indelible stains of war that long survive combat and often transform the once innocent into the restless and the alien.