The August issue of The Priest magazine, published by Our Sunday Visitor, carries an article by Br. Ezra Sullivan, O.P.

Br. Ezra is a deacon, serving this summer at the parish of St. Dominic in Youngstown, OH. Here, he answers some questions about this book, which has been on the New York Times bestseller list for paperback fiction for 109 consecutive weeks. 

What is The Shack about?

The Shack is the work of William P. Young, a son of Protestant missionaries. The story is about Mackenzie Allen Phillips, "Mack", a married Christian man with three children. During a family vacation, his daughter Missy gets kidnapped. Soon enough, Mack and some police investigators find Missy's bloodied dress in an abandoned shack; they easily conclude that she was abducted by a notorious child-killer. Years go by and Mack has not dealt well with the loss. Then, one day, he receives a note in his mailbox: "Mackenzie, it's been a while. I've missed you. I'll be back at the shack next weekend if you want to get together." The note is signed "Papa."

With mixed emotions, Mack goes to the shack. There he finds God the Trinity. God the Father is represented as "a large beaming African-American woman" called "Papa". God the Holy Spirit is represented as an Asian woman called "Sarayu". God the Son is represented as a modern Jesus, with blue jeans and a flannel shirt. The bulk of The Shack (about two thirds) consists in the conversations which take place over a series of days in and around the shack between the characters Mack and the three Divine Persons. Without discounting the importance of the overall story-arc, one might notice that the story exists primarily to provide a context for the conversation: the key messages of the book lie here. Through talking and being with God, Mack loses his "Great Sadness," learns to be "a child again," and comes to embrace "even the darker shades of life as part of some incredibly rich and profound tapestry; crafted masterfully by invisible hands of love," with a renewed faith and love for Jesus.

Why was it important to write about?

Young's novel, with an estimated 10 million copies in print, has had remarkable commercial success. One reason for this is the effective way the novel encourages its readers to pass it on to their friends and families - a good example of word-of-mouth advertising, or "viral marketing," if you prefer. That is how I heard of it: A friend, a father of five, introduced the novel to me. He said it was thought-provoking but possibly had some theological abnormalities... Would I mind reading it and letting him know what I thought? 

It turns out that many people have had this experience, including a number of my brother Dominicans. After realizing the wide impact Young's novel was having on the minds of Catholics throughout the U.S., I decided it could be worthwhile to analyze its contents carefully, with prayer, in light of the Trinitarian theology of the ancient Church Fathers. Many people have discussed The Shack's theology; even a tremendously popular secular web-magazine such as Slate had a recent article about it. What I hoped to do was approach the novel's theology in a particularly Dominican way, from the perspective of traditional Christian teaching in light of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. I hope that, through my work, readers of The Shack will be better equipped to navigate through much of its well meaning but wrong-headed understanding of the faith, especially that of the Most Holy Trinity.

But The Shack doesn't claim to be a work of "theology." Why analyze it as such?

Young's work is clearly a work of fiction. But it is also a theological work. It can be understood as a dialogue set in the context of a story; in this way and even as a novel, The Shack follows the pattern of formal dialogues as seen in Plato's Phaedrus or Peter Kreeft's Socrates Meets Jesus. While the setting may be a part of the author's overall message - scholars have made much of the location and action in the Phaedrus - the meat of the work rests in what is said. The divine-human conversation in Young's novel, then, is clearly the most significant part of the work, and it therefore deserves our concentrated attention.

In his novel, Young is by and large concerned with theodicy: he tries to give an account of God's goodness in light of the problem of evil. While theodicy is often considered to be a philosophic issue, in the course of pursing his main aim, Young also makes a number of claims about more properly theological issues, such as the work of Jesus Christ and the nature of the Holy Trinity. Here, then, one can analyze the theological claims of Young just as one can analyze the claims of any theologian - and this is good work for Dominicans.

Can you recommend any other inspirational works of similar length and subject matter, but of sound Christian outlook?

Many Catholic writers have dealt with questions of suffering and God's providence. At the end of my article, I note that St. Faustina Kowalska has written about God's merciful providence in her well-known Diary. Additionally, one would do well to look to Walter Ciszek's With God in Russia and its sequel, He Leadeth Me. Each contains a good story, careful reflection, and reliable theology.

Several months ago, another student brother of our province, Br. Michael O'Connor. O.P. published this response to the book on our website.