We asked some friends of the Corner: What are you reading in anticipation of Easter?

FREDERICA MATHEWES-GREEN

I’m reading for the first time the classic Who Moved the Stone? by British journalist Frank Morison. He had planned to shore up his agnosticism by a meticulous study of the Gospel texts about Christ’s Passion, and ended up being converted to Christian faith instead. It’s admirable, and very helpful; for the first time, the blur of names and places during those days are falling into a coherent pattern for me.

— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for NPR’s Morning Edition, Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.

DAVID NEFF

Oscar Cullmann’s 60-page monograph first published in 1958 (and rather hard to find now) Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?: The Witness of the New Testament. The darn thing is listed used on Amazon from $10 to over $200.

Fortunately, the essay was reprinted in Immortality and Resurrection, a collection of four lectures edited by Krister Stendahl.

Why do I like it? It was a pioneering essay that stripped Greek philosophical accretions from a Christian understanding of life after death and helped us recover biblical notions of bodily resurrection. The more recent 740-page doorstop volume by N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God is the magnificent feast for which Cullmann’s essay was the hors d’oeuvre.

– David Neff is editor in chief of ChristianityToday Media Group.

FR. GEORGE RUTLER

I would recommend Christ in His Mysteries by Blessed Columba Marmion.

Marmion, an Irishman who became Abbot of Maredsous Abbey in Belgium, and a leading spiritual writer of the twentieth century, approached the Resurrection through the liturgy, as the Church’s living and ongoing experience of Christ alive and at work in the world.

— Fr. George W. Rutler is pastor of the Church of Our Saviour in Manhattan.

AMY WELBORN

The Feast of the Resurrection grabs my attention even more than usual this year. Over the past few years, one book that has greatly helped me understand the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus and explain it to others has been N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God. Weighty, but important. But, as Pope Benedict XVI says, the power of the Resurrection lies not in its existence as a historical event, but in its present reality. His beautiful reflections on Easter in the small, lovely book, Images of Hope bring that point home.

– Amy Welborn blogs at Via Media.