Dayspring

BeautifulDisturbingSacredProfaneEroticChastePretentiousModestIntellectualCommonJoyfulDevastatingA collection of oppositions, like nothing you have experienced before or will experience again.

absolutely wrenching and gorgeous and abandoned and deeply deeply TRUE. I can barely breathe. I feel riven, like one of the ancient mystics oliveira includes here. just absolutely stunning

Easily my favorite book I’ve read in 2025 so far. This sometimes-in-verse novel is narrated from the perspective of Jesus’ disciple John, who is having a gay love affair with the son of God. Most of it takes place in ancient Judea, but small portions take place in modern Canada. The text is interspersed with excerpts from the writings of various saints and poets—shout out to John Donne’s “Batter my heart, three-person’d God”! One of my favs! The book is both intellectually stimulating and extremely horny. I loved it. I read the physical book, but for what it’s worth, I’ve heard the audiobook is also excellent.This review was originally published on my blog.

I’ve long enjoyed Anthony Oliveira’s presence on social media, simply by virtue of the fascinating but narrow Venn diagram he represents – how often do you find a queer theologian and classics academic who also loves camp cinema and the X-Men (well, comics in general, but you know the way to my heart), all while also just being entertaining, deeply human/e, and just a fascinating, unique person? Oh, and he’s also a phenomenal writer, as his essay “A Year in Apocalypses” will testify. So it didn’t take me much to be sold on Dayspring, Oliveira’s debut work of fiction, basically sight unseen. Closer to prose poetry than it is a traditional novel, Dayspring is remarkably hard to summarize or even convey in my capsule reviews; in its broadest sense, it is the story of John, the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” and his relationship with Christ, one anchored both by emotional and sexual love and desire. Now, is that relationship a retelling of the Gospels, or is it a modern allegorical telling? Well…yes – and it’s also a post-modern telling, in which Christ (whose dialogue is written in red font) points out the historical origins of some of the tales around him, remarks that some of these stories have been revised over time, rolls his eyes over Peter’s inability to understand metaphors, and in general, reminds us that if Christ came to earth as a man, then he must have lived as a man – which means that he might have farted on his boyfriend, or yelled at the sea when he was frustrated with it, and so forth. And if all of this sounds like a conventionally religious book, well, it should not (and if you know me, you know that my own feelings on Christianity are…complicated) – did you miss that Christ has a boyfriend, whichever time period we are in, or that this is a book that is both about queer love but also divinity, about the way society weaponizes faith against queer people but also denies Christ’s messages of acceptance, about how the gospels and so much of the Bible are revised and edited over the years into “canon” while also being something more for so many people? And it’s also a book about what we do with all of this in the modern era – an era where Christianity has become toxic and corrupted for so many of us past the point of repair, where “religion” too often has come to mean “hateful and vile,” where queer people are still judged for actions that can be found even in religious texts. Somehow, Oliveira turns all of this into a beautiful, sprawling, meditative work that feels deeply personal to his interests – side tracks into medieval art, allusions to comics, musings on historical writings, astonishingly beautiful writing – and yet hits home even for this straight agnostic (at best) English teacher in the American south. (Mind you, this is a book so dense with allusions – religious, historical, literary, and more – that it certainly will appeal more to those with a knowledge of those fields, especially Christianity.) It is a dense book whose short length belies its complexity, density, and nuance, but it’s also a beautiful book about hope, about shaping the world with the goal of moving forward, about reminding us that change is a process and not an end, about the fallibility and beauty of humanity, and about the fundamental belief that things cannot always be like this, but that it is up to us to fight for this and move on. I found it a truly moving book, one that I annotated and marked up to high heaven for its beauty but also for its humanity and its hope – at a time where the world can feel overwhelming and faith can feel like a fool’s errand, Dayspring is a meditation on what humanity means, on what it meant to have a fully human God on earth, and what it can teach us about our own lives – and in doing so, I was left deeply moved and inspired by its impact.

Absolutely destroyed me in the best possible way.

Reading along with this book as an adult who grew up Catholic and left the faith as a teenager, this brought up a lot of memories of trying to find something I could relate to or felt real to me as a kid. A lot of ideas and connections I'd forgotten about, but Oliveira's writing made a lot rush back. The whole book has this echoing mix of religious text with modern life that I've never seen done so well. It ping-pongs between funny and heartfelt, and I can't count how many times I had to take a break to say "phew" after reading a passage.I wanted to call out how incredible the audio book version of this is. The main two leads especially sound so much like the queer men in my life, and they're both wildly talented actors. The way they portray the Jesus character in particular with this earnestness and modern casualness to his speech, keeping this sort of aloof teen jock persona even while quoting scripture or performing a miracle. I'm not usually a big audio book listener but this is on another level and it feels like such a treat to hear the writing come to life in this way. Give it try!

Like the bible, Dayspring is poetic and very queer. It's viscerally incarnate, and about love. As someone else whose childhood was firmly Catholicised it was so familiar and so sad—I was brought right back to the rooms in which I argued with my catechism and CCD teachers, and personally, lost my faith. There are still some so beautiful things that I miss—the messages I always felt I was reading opposite of everyone else—and somehow this book contains all of them. It doesn't ignore all the things about religion that are anathema to faith and love, but here at least love is stronger. This one will stay with me a while.

Every time I picked up this book, as an early reader and a listener to the author's podcast, Dayspring picked me up and carried me with it and set me down, moved by its eloquence and by its raw grief and beauty (and delighted by its humor, too).The book draws deeply and carefully from Christian traditions (for me as a Jewish reader, both the familiar and the surprising), from pop culture, and from deeply personal moments that we all now share.I finished Dayspring with a tear in my eye and am so excited that this book is in the world.