At the end of January, Louise came back home, grabbed her mail as she passed through the lobby of her building in the XIXth arrondissement of Paris. “As usual, full of real estate agency brochures, supermarket catalogs… And then this slightly heavier mail, in a rather pretty purple envelope, intrigues me.” In the envelope, a “kind of strange,” “very kitschy” book catches her attention.
“I put it on my bedside table, telling myself that I should take a closer look, but it clearly looked like a cult book,” observes the young woman. And Louise is not the only one who has questions about this book. “I open my mailbox, I find a book to guide me on the path to God after being lost and defiled,” recounts a man in Paris. Another confirms having received the same thing.
Olivier, on his end, lives on rue Sidi-Brahim in the XIIth arrondissement. One evening, returning from the bakery, he crossed paths with “delivery guys pulling a trailer full of purple envelopes that they were distributing in the buildings.” Without seeming to be fully aware of what he was doing, one of them confided to him that it was mail distributed by the city hall, but he avoids the mailboxes marked with the “Stop Pub” label. Perplexed, Olivier picked up an envelope. “I opened it in the elevator, the purple color, the photo of a child… I thought it was a Jehovah’s Witness book.” Curious, he nevertheless looked through it but immediately threw it in the trash.
On the back cover, a price of 9.58 euros is indicated, but the book has indeed landed for free in the mailboxes of hundreds of thousands of Parisians. 670,000 in total. This is at least what seems to be indicated on the Mission Valley Community Chapel’s X account, a church located in San Diego, California (United States).
The book’s author, Tom Cantor, wants to “evangelize Paris.” On December 31st last year, Tom Cantor, the author of the book, delivered a sermon on this page, expressing his wish to evangelize Paris in the new year about to begin. A gift that some surely could have done without. Tom Cantor is an American evangelist, and in his book “Transformed,” a particularly badly translated 85-page autobiography, he intends to tell his journey as a believer.
Flipping through the self-published book, it’s difficult to know what the author is getting at. In the introduction, Tom Cantor mentions that he invites the reader “to join him on his personal journey.” The founder of Scantibodies Laboratory recounts that he considers himself to be a Jew who believes in Jesus Christ. In March 2022, he told the “New York Post” that he wrote “Transformed” in 2010, the year during which doctors diagnosed him with cancer.
The evangelist has done this before. In February 2023, according to the online media outlet “Block Club Chicago,” Tom Cantor’s religious book had mysteriously ended up in the mailboxes of Chicago residents. And according to the “New York Post,” in March 2022, New Yorkers had a similar surprise. Before them, residents of Detroit, St. Louis, and Portland had been targeted.
