About the Author

Louis Simon is a pastor of the Reformed Church of France. Beginning in the early 1960s hundreds of students and intellectuals flocked to the parish of Massy-Palaiseau (near Paris) to hear his sermons. He later served in Montpellier where he now lives in retirement.

Charles Courtney, retired Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Drew Theological School, regularly attended services at Massy-Palaiseau while a Fulbright student from 1962 to 1964. A specialist in phenomenology, he has degrees from Monmouth (IL) College, Harvard Divinity School, and Northwestern University.

Reviews

""This is preaching at its most basic and most profound. Most basic because all of these sermons are rooted and find their life in biblical texts about Jesus from the Gospels. Most profound because Simon's sermons, like good parables, consistently upend our expectations and help us see Jesus--and our life in Jesus--in a whole new way. They are fresh, disarming, and deeply theological."" -Leonora Tubbs Tisdale Clement-Muehl Professor of Homiletics Yale Divinity School ""'Jesus' renown imprisons him, ' laments Louis Simon, the author of this startling collection of freshly translated sermons. After observing the difficulty of meeting Jesus 'face to face, ' Simon the preacher sighs, 'Alas.' As hard as it is to hear the Gospel afresh, it breaks free again and again in these pages. Layers of religious pretension, gooey piety, and encrusted orthodoxies are cracked open by the piercing prose--nearly poetry--of this French preacher."" -David M. Greenhaw President, Eden Theological Seminary ""Beginners preach from the obscure texts; veterans from the more familiar ones. Louis Simon combines the best of both by making the home shores strange and obscuring the familiar so that it can become fresh again. This book of virtuoso sermons may well be the best cure for claustrophobic Christianity out there. Pick up 'My' Jesus and start anywhere and find out why two distinguished philosophers such as Paul Ricoeur and Charles Courtney would invest their talents in making these masterpieces available to a wider audience."" -Leonard Sweet Professor Drew University and George Fox University ""This remarkable collection of newly translated sermons comes from another time and place-Protestant France of two generations ago. Reading good sermons from outside one's context tends to jostle all the current assumptions how familiar Bible texts should be understood and preached. In sermon after sermon, Louis Simon takes the familiar, turns it on its head, and leaves the reader nodding and whispering, 'Just so, just so.'"" -Michael L. Lindvall Senior Minister of the Brick Presbyterian Church New York City