As The Body and the Blood begins, it is raining bullets in the Via Dolorosa. Braving war zones, often on a daily basis, journalist Charles Sennott spent the year 2000 retracing the path of Jesus" life, from Bethlehem to Emmaus, to write about the Holy Land"s Christians. His goal was "to open a window for Western Christians into the Middle East conflict, to encourage them to think about the realities of this land, and about what it means if the living presence of Christianity here should wither and die." On his journey, Sennott encounters many salty characters and strange scenes, which he describes with effective economy: "In one Jerusalem parish, there were not enough young Christian men left to carry a casket at a funeral." Sennott, The Boston Globe"s Middle East bureau chief, believes that Christianity has traditionally "provided a kind of leavening in the Middle East, a small but necessary ingredient acting as a buffer between the Arab world"s broad Islamic resurgence and the strands within Israel of a rising, ultranationalist brand of Judaism." His book is not merely a political travelogue, however. He also makes Middle Eastern Christianity relevant to the everyday lives of Western readers, by showing that Palestinian- Israeli conflicts are rooted in the same social and spiritual conflicts that shaped Jesus" ministry. --Michael Joseph Gross