Between Noon and Three: Romance, Law, and the Outrage of Grace »

Picture a college town in the mid-1970s. An English professor who has become an expert in extramarital dalliances is smitten by one of his graduate students. They meet for lunch around noon, and before three they make declarations of love. Is it possible that their subsequent affair could ultimately teach us something about true forgiveness and the radical meaning of grace? Only Robert Farrar Capon would have the audacity - and the authorial skill - to fashion such a tale. It has taken well over a decade for Between Noon and Three to appear in this, its original form. First published under two separate titles with significant parts excised and an entire section recast, the real Between Noon and Three is actually a trilogy of intertwined tales, each of which exhibits Capon's persistent insistence on the outrageous nature of grace. The original manuscript is here printed in full, including a new introduction by Capon on the work's unusual history.

Publishers Weekly

With wit, humor and exegesis, Capon evokes a bit of C.S. Lewis as he brushes past centuries of dry theologizing on concepts of grace and freedom, law and sin, and actually makes the questions fun.

Introduction: Back at the Beginning

PART I: PARABLE

1. Law, Grace, and the Free Drink
2. The Tyranny of Angels
3. 'Twas Grace that Taught My Heart . . .
4. Interlude with Augustine
5. The Rising Tide
6. Greater Trumps
7. Catharine
8. Death
9. Laura
10. Resurrection
11. Beyond All Liking and Happening
12. From Noon till Three
13. Morality vs. Grace
14. Two Pauls
15. Spirituality vs. Grace
16. Superstition vs. Grace
17. The Picnic

PART II: COFFEE HOUR

18. To the Woodshed
19. Sticks, Stones, and Snake Oil
20. An Unacceptable Parable
21. Objections from the Floor
22. And Having Done That, Thou Hast Donne . . .
23. As Pants the Hart for Cooling Streams . . .

PART III: THE YOUNGEST DAY

24. Rub-out
25. Afterlife
26. The Four Last Things
27. Tracking the Mystery of Reconciliation
28. Re-membering the Garden
29. The Outrage of Grace
30. Rigged Justice
31. The Hell of It All
32. Heaven in a Nutshell
33. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus