Psychic Pancakes & Communion Pizza

Psychic Pancakes and Communion Pizza is Bert Montgomery’s highly anticipated follow-up to Elvis, Willie, Jesus & Me. Containing reflections on music, film, culture, and life, one can find Jesus (and sometimes even the Church!) in the midst of it all. The book is firmly rooted in time and place—a 21^st-century university town in the South—yet ventures into a varying array of topics and subjects; everything from Hurricane Katrina to the Super Bowl Saints, from Ellen DeGeneres to Charlie Manson, and from suicide to salvation. And, there's a little more Elvis and Willie thrown in for good measure!

Bert Montgomery is a minister at University Baptist Church in Starkville, Mississippi, teaches religion and sociology at Mississippi State University, and is discovering that he probably consumes a little too much pizza.

Endorsements

Bert Montgomery is a person after my own heart. He loves the world that John’s Gospel tells us God loves—with all of its great music, interesting people, and delightful food, not the least of which are pancakes and pizza. In my church we celebrate the Still-Speaking God, the one whose revelation of love in a new key breaks into human experience through the beauty of the ordinary and the sacraments of common. Bert gets that. In the music of Johnny Cash and Elvis, Derek Trucks and Tom Waits, Bert sees life the way a good preacher worth her salt sees life, as a chance for God’s transcendent grace to invade the moment, for the story of God’s love for every person to be told again—even though some won’t want to hear it. Bert hears it in country songs, prayerful funeral dirges, and rowdy music to wake the dead; he sees it on the big and little screens and reads it in the tired eyes and sighs of his dinner companions. I hear it there, too, and here in these “psychic pancakes.” Can we get more syrup over here?

— Brian Quincy Newcomb,
Music critic at www.ucc.org/news and Senior Pastor,
David’s United Church of Christ, Kettering, Ohio

Bert Montgomery does what Jesus did: grounds faith in the earthly, the real, the tactile. I wish they’d recorded some of Jesus’ funny, off-hand lines, but I’m grateful that we’ve got a bunch of Bert’s best to make faith life-giving and fun.

— Joseph Phelps,
Highland Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky

Titles of Related Interest

Elvis, Willie, Jesus & Me	Who Moved My Pulpit?	Telling Stories	I Feel Better All Over Than I do Anywhere Else