A choreographed propaganda video was released in 2015 which showed ISIS militants behead twenty-one orange-clad Chrisitan men on a Libyan beach. Martin Mosebach travelled to the Egyptian village of El-Aour to meet their families and better understand the faith and culture that shaped such conviction.

Recommended by an ACU Faculty member, The 21: A Journey into the Land of Coptic Martyrs is written by Martin Mosebach who offers a travelogue of his encounters with the families of “The Twenty-One,” and with a foreign culture and an ancient church that has preserved the faith and liturgy of early Christianity – the “church of the martyrs.”

As a religious minority in Muslim Egypt, the Copts find themselves caught in a clash of civilization. This also serves as an account of the spiritual lives of an Arab country stretched between extremism and pluralism.

In twenty-one symbolic chapters (one chapter for each man beheaded), we are lead through the lives of these men by the families they left behind.