Page 1235 – Christianity Today (2024)

On the front of the dust jacket of Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, & Discovery, Rachel Adams is smiling. She holds her son—clearly the Henry named in the title—in a playful dance, his small hand in hers, while he grins at the camera. It's a sweet, mother-and-child image that captures the close affection and mutual delight that I've known with my own sons, and I immediately found myself wanting to learn more about this woman and about her son Henry. What's not to love?

When her first son, Noah, is born, Adams is already a published author, a professor of English at Columbia University, and has been with her (similarly successful) husband, Jon, for 13 years. Having lost her own mother as a child, and having been raised to measure success in terms of academic and professional achievement, she finds the transition to motherhood painful at first. She wishes she could feel as comfortable behind a stroller as behind a lectern. "I disliked staying home with my baby, and I hated myself for disliking it," she says.

Gradually, however, Adams grows to accept her new role and to truly love her child. And as the birth of her second son approaches, she looks forward to his arrival with high hopes. He will be the perfect addition to their little family. Before Adams goes into labor with Henry, she is already in love with the healthy, beautiful baby she expects him to be.

In the moments after Henry is born and his diagnosis of Down syndrome is revealed, however, her hopes and expectations fall, unceremoniously, to the delivery room floor. Henry enters the world like a sledgehammer, smashing Adams' carefully laid plans to rubble: "I couldn't stop crying. I'd like to say I cried because I was worried about the baby upstairs in the NICU. But I didn't feel much of anything for him. I was mourning the loss of the son I thought I was going to have and the family I imagined we would be."

It's hard to fault her for her emotions at that moment. As the mother of a child battling cancer, I understand the shock of hearing hard news from a medical professional, and I have felt the weight of the life-altering decisions required to cope with that news. A great deal of Adams' story resonated with my own experiences. But more often than not, as I read her account of the birth and first few years of her son's life, I found that I sorrowed for her less for the challenges arising from Henry's mental and physical disability and more for the challenges arising from her own spiritual disability.

While Adams' mind is terribly bright, her path lies in terrible darkness. When it comes to facing the bigger questions, the deeper struggles, the darker fears, Adams has nothing to hold onto but empty fatalism. "At bottom," she says, "we humans are meat just like the lamb on my plate."

Adams' understanding of what we all are at bottom calls into question the possibility of meaning for Henry's life—or any life. Yet she seems to prefer that meaninglessness to the religious alternative. Before her husband's Bible Belt parents meet Henry, she says, "I told Jon I couldn't bear it if they talked about God." And after other relatives visit, she is relieved when she realizes that "nobody had mentioned God or angels or Jesus. Nobody had described Henry as a gift or a blessing."

"I don't live in the kind of world," she says, "where people say that Henry was sent to us for a reason."

If I were living my life as an outworking of Adams' worldview, I imagine the ultimate pointlessness of it all would crush me. At times, it seems nearly to crush her. And it certainly affects both her day-to-day decisions and her most momentous choices.

Rachel Adams lives in New York— a city with an abortion rate that is nearly double the national average—and in an era when, according to one government study, the abortion rate for children diagnosed with Down syndrome has reached upwards of 90 percent. That Henry survived the womb at all is a statistical improbability, and Adams feels compelled to explain Henry's existence: "We live in a world," she says, "where a baby like Henry demands a story."

"I never had an amniocentesis," she writes:

I know. This is shockingly risky behavior on the part of an ambitious, overeducated, overachieving person like myself. Amnio was made for people like me, women with a deep need for order and control and perfection. Women who strongly believe in the right to an abortion. Technology was supposed to liberate the woman who needs to know she will never have to be the mother of a child like Henry.

It turns out that preliminary tests indicated a low likelihood of Down syndrome, so Adams felt secure enough that the odds would play out in her favor. In retrospect, she asks herself, "What the hell was I thinking?"

How the hell could Henry have been allowed to live long enough to see daylight? This child, who ought to have been perfect, betrayed her to a life of endless self-sacrifices. And therefore, at least at the outset, she believes it would have been better if he had never been born.

This conviction is a bloody stain that continues to seep through the rest of Henry's story.

The work of raising Henry is undeniably hard. But Adams repeatedly gives the impression that a child like Henry can realistically be cared for only by highly educated, metropolitan parents with ready access to legal advisors, medical experts, nannies, élite day care centers, and endless therapists. While several perfectly ordinary friends of mine are, without massive interventions or expensive and extraordinary efforts, raising healthy, happy children who share Henry's diagnosis, Henry's care moves from one paid professional to another.

Adams regrets how few adults she sees with Down syndrome while simultaneously advocating the very beliefs and practices that result in so few adults with Down syndrome.

First, Adams hires a live-in, round-the-clock nurse to hold and feed Henry. When her job is finished, Adams then worries, "How would we explain Down syndrome to Angela, our Dominican nanny? Worst of all, I was tormented by the thought that Henry wouldn't be able to go to daycare with Noah." After the nanny and daycare are covered, she says, "I threw myself into the task of organizing Henry's appointments and getting him the best possible team of therapists." She spends hours ensuring that Henry finds his way into the right early intervention programs and schools and then busies herself with on-campus advocacy work that might eventually allow Henry greater opportunities in higher education and beyond.

Adams pursues some truly admirable goals, but for all of her work on Henry's behalf, she often comes across simply as Henry's personal administrator. She offers the reader very few glimpses into her son's own unique personality, and she spends so much time working for Henry that I wonder how she finds any time to spend with Henry.

Of course, I understand that parenting is never a solo act. We all need plenty of outside help, and parents of kids with special needs certainly require more support than most. Nevertheless, the long list of hired caregivers for this little boy from morning until night left me wondering: Who, exactly, is Raising Henry?

It's not that Adams is a terrible mother. She's not. She wants her boys to have full, fulfilling lives, and I do believe that she is doing the best she knows how under the circ*mstances—circ*mstances that are often very hard indeed. Troubles seem to come at her from every side, and it's easy to find fault wherever she looks.

She blames herself for not getting the right prenatal screening. She blames the doctors and interns for their insensitivity. She blames the hospital for not having enough support available. She blames the parenting books for skipping over Down syndrome and treating it like a disease. She blames society for its lack of accommodation. As she confesses later, "Jon likes to call me 'the elephant of wrongs,' the person who never forgets a slight or a disagreement."

And yet, while it's true that many of the attitudes she encounters are inexcusable, her moral framework isn't solid enough to uphold many of her (legitimate) objections. It wobbles under the weight of its own contradictions.

"No woman," she says, "should be forced to give birth to an unwanted child." But at the same time, she expects that the rest of society should be "forced" to provide for a child it may not want. Adams regrets how few adults she sees with Down syndrome while simultaneously advocating the very beliefs and practices that result in so few adults with Down syndrome. She has no patience for the attitude that cannot recognize the personhood of someone with physical or mental weaknesses. And yet physical and mental weakness (due to gestational age) is the dehumanizing basis upon which abortion is justified in the first place.

Adams occasionally hints that she recognizes some of these contradictions, but she clearly does not know—or does not want to know—how to resolve the tension. When she begins to consider what her own convictions might have done to Henry's life, she cannot face the thought. "I try to imagine what it would be like if Henry's story and mine had unfolded differently. What if I had made different choices? Taken more tests? I try," she says, "but I've never been able to do it. As Jon said matter-of-factly soon after Henry was born, 'It happened to us.' "

Henry happened. He has a disability, and there is, for Adams, no ultimate reason or purpose for it. It just happened, and she is dealing with the consequences. But clearly something far more than Down syndrome has "happened" as well. That photo on the cover is no lie.

Adams finds true delight in her role as Henry's mom, and she knows how to give good gifts to her children. If he asks for bread, she's not going to give him a stone. In fact, she'll probably bake him a cake. By the end of the book, she has come to embrace Henry for who he is—Down syndrome included. Knowing what Adams recounts through the rest of the book, however, makes those moments of happiness ring hollow.

In spite of the joy, the successes, and the hopes for a brighter future, it's hard for a Christian not to pity the bleak meaninglessness of Adams' whole endeavor. She's right that Henry's life does demand a story, but she cannot see that, even before Henry arrived, he was already part of a much bigger story—a story of which she is not the author. I can only hope that Rachel Adams will someday come to discover that Henry's life—as well as her own—is one of deeper meaning and more eternal value than she has ever been able to comprehend.

Hannah K. Grieser designs graphics in small-town Idaho, where she and her husband are raising five sons and too much zucchini.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

A friend recently relayed to me a story about a pastor he knew who decided to print the Facebook pages of some of the teens in his congregation, supersizing them on enormous posterboard, and putting them up around the sanctuary. When the kids walked in, they were outraged that the pastor would put up their private thoughts for the whole world to see. Which was exactly the point.

As adults we often wonder what adolescents (and even some other adults, ahem) are thinking when they post personal details of their lives on social networking websites. Don't they know that college admissions officers, potential bosses, and even a few tech-savvy parents can read all that information? The short answer, according to Danah Boyd, is yes. Kids realize that others can read it. It's just that they assume no one besides the intended audience will do so.

In It's Complicated:The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Boyd first explains how kids see social networking sites. "Unlike me and the other early adopters who avoided our local community by hanging out in chatrooms and bulletin boards, most teenagers now go online to connect to the people in their community." Most parents probably realize that their teens are not using Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare to escape social interaction. But Boyd takes it a step further and suggests that adults have left teens with few outlets for other kinds of social interaction.

Our helicopter parenting, compulsion to overschedule our children's lives, and deepest fears about "stranger danger" have meant that teens (at least middle- and upper-class ones) do a lot less hanging out than they used to. If they can't go to the mall, they go online. As Heather, one 16-year-old in Iowa, told Boyd, "I can't really see people in person. I can barely hang out with my friends on the weekend, let alone people I don't talk to as often. I'm so busy. I've got lots of homework. I'm busy with track, I've got a job." Boyd says, "For Heather, social media is not only a tool; it is a social lifeline that enables her to stay connected to people she cares about but cannot otherwise interact with in person."

So teens see social media as the online equivalent of the mall. It's a public space where you nonetheless expect some privacy. You're not sitting in your parents' kitchen. You're not having a conversation outside the teachers' lounge. When you're walking around a public space with your friends, it's unlikely that someone is eavesdropping on you. But just as you would probably end the conversation at the mall if you saw a group of your friends' parents sitting at the next table, so you should probably think about changing your expectations of privacy on Facebook.

Many of the parents that Boyd interviews see it as their responsibility to hover. And many of the teens, not surprisingly, complain. Boyd makes the age-old argument that if you don't let teens have some independence, they won't make the right choices when they are finally given some freedom. "Parents often engage in these acts out of love," she writes, "but fail to realize how surveillance is a form of oppression that limits teens' ability to make independent choices." Yep. That's parenthood for you.

Which reminds me, Danah Boyd is actually danah boyd. In the intergenerational battle, those lower-case letters give her away. She's on the side of the teenagers. And she's also, by the way, on the side of technology. In fact, she's a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. I imagine she would have a hard time keeping her job if she found that teens' use of technology is deeply harmful to them in some way.

Occasionally, boyd has the facts on her side. She explains to parents that the dangers for their children online do not come from some preponderance of predators. Just like there aren't a lot of pedophiles hanging around your local park or kidnappers lurking at the mall's foodcourt, there is not a high likelihood that your child will be victimized by a stranger online. "Internet-initiated sexual assaults," she writes, "are rare. The overall number of sex crimes against minors has been steadily declining since 1992, which also suggests that the internet is not creating a new plague."

In this area, as in other topics, boyd suggests that the internet has not fundamentally altered human nature. It is merely a new technology reflecting the same old realities. To some extent she is right. She notes that it was probably a little bit utopian to believe that the internet, through the anonymity it supposedly offered, would help to erase our social divisions.

In fact, just as kids congregate in different parts of the cafeteria, depending on their race, class, and what crowd they fit into, so kids online also gravitate toward certain sites. Their groups of friends are no more diverse online than they are in real life. She chronicles the way that whites migrated to Facebook even while blacks stayed on MySpace. The white kids found the MySpace profiles tacky, preferring the "clean" graphics of Facebook, while the black kids liked the "bling" that was available on MySpace.

But if boyd is helpful in calming excessive fears, her brisk reassurances are ultimately unpersuasive. She never addresses what really is different about the internet. It has brought material into our homes through the back door that we never would have allowed through the front. It is nothing less than shocking that boyd includes only one mention of the word "p*rnography" in her entire book. And that single mention is part of a long list of things that the public has "angst" about.

In a recent essay for the Daily Mail, the former editor of a magazine called Loaded described what he saw when he visited a class of 13- and 14-year-olds in the north of England. A researcher asked the kids questions about what they had viewed online. And without exception these middle-class white boys and girls were very familiar with the genre. I'll spare you most of the details (there was actually a term they all knew for sex with a woman who had no arms or legs), but they knew about things that even the researcher was unsure of. They reported that they were sent links to these pictures, videos, and such (whether they wanted them or not) via social networking sites.

So no, danah boyd, hanging out on Facebook is not exactly like hanging out at the mall. And the truth of the matter is that kids interact differently with each other when they are communicating online. Just like we all do. We misunderstand the tone of emails because we have no facial expressions (except emoticons) to help us understand. It is much easier to be nasty to someone when you don't have to see or even hear (over the phone) his or her reaction.

Aside from the fact that it brings our kids into contact with content we would rather they wait a few years (or a lifetime) to see, social networking also makes teens believe (even more so than they already do) that the world revolves around them. Their lives, their drama, the mean kids, the boys they like, the girls who don't like them—all of their friends and enemies could be communicating with them or about them at any hour of the day. Gossiping, bullying, whatever you want to call it, it seems like there is no break.

It is our job as mothers and fathers to remind them that there is a world outside the soap opera of middle school and high school. Boyd may call that "oppression," but I just call it parenting.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author most recently of Got Religion? How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back (Templeton Press).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

My mother-in-law shared a home with my family for seven years, and as her health declined, I became her primary caregiver. Since Jeanne's death in 2008, I've read dozens of books on caregiving and end-of-life issues. When I look back at my years of caregiving, I don't feel the same sense of darkness and loss I once felt. Sometimes I even feel victorious in a way, because I made it through. I cared for Jeanne to the end. I did the right thing. And now I am free—for the time being. I know another season of caregiving is ahead of me—for my own parents, for my husband, for a close friend or one of my children when some unforeseen illness or disability interrupts our plans. When we pledge, "for better or for worse," we envision walking off into the sunset hand-in-hand. What bride sees future dementia in the shining eyes of her groom? We live in a broken, fallen world. We will all die, and many of us will die slowly. Most of us live as if it won't happen to us, to our loved ones, but it will. And when it does, there's no way out but through.

In No Saints Around Here: A Caregiver's Days, Susan Allen Toth writes her way through the last 18 months of her husband's decline due to Parkinson's and dementia. "I never wanted to look very far down our road," she writes:

I knew where it would end, but not the twists, dizzying curves, and detours it would take. Instead of trying to peer through an opaque and terrifying mist, I mostly kept my eyes on my feet: one step forward, another step. Step, step, pause. Step, step, keep going.

James was diagnosed with Parkinson's after a small stroke (he was 71). Toth turned to literature, reading memoir after memoir to learn what life would be like as the disease eventually progressed into disability and dementia. "But I was also looking for something more. I wanted a report from the front lines. I wanted details." The memoirs Toth read were all written in retrospect:

No one gave me an unblinkered, running account as caregiving gradually grew from a mild nuisance to a constant worry to an all-consuming way of life. The little things, not just the big stuff: that is what I wanted to hear. No one told me how she (or he) felt when she had to brush and floss her husband's teeth.

So Toth began to record "the little things." She wrote to understand what was happening to her and to James, but she also wrote to the future—to those of us who will one day be caregivers in need of fellowship with someone who knows what it's really like.

Toth's memoir consists of dated essays written in the present tense. She told herself if she ever created a book-length work out of this journal, she would not change a thing—she wanted to keep the sense of immediacy in her notes from the trenches. She confesses that in the end she did cut some material that seemed extraneous, but she does not reveal whether she otherwise revised the manuscript from its first draft. The book certainly retains the character of an unedited journal, which is both a strength and a weakness.

Each time I sat down and opened the book, I felt I was reading a heartfelt letter from a friend, and as the chapters accrued, I came to know Toth and her husband as well as I know many friends. Toth's writing is well tuned and enjoyable, and she takes us deep inside each moment. Her day begins in the kitchen with a mug of Earl Grey tea with milk and the baby monitor on the counter turned up so she can hear when James begins to wake:

Now it is time to set out the morning pills, his and mine. Cut his big ones in half. Place the Kleenex, sheets of paper towel, and wastebasket by his chair. Pour juice and water. Start his coffee. Put away last night's dishes if I had been too tired to do that. Oops, fresh water for the cats. We're almost out of orange juice. Make a note. Oops again, I need to move James's bottle of laxative where I'll see it, or I might forget the morning dose. Uh oh, James is now moving again, antsy, wanting to start his day. Upstairs. "Okay, get your balance. Careful, careful. Now head to the stairs. One foot at a time. Excellent, excellent. Another foot. Yes, excellent. Now straight ahead to the chair."

In these moments I see my future self, my future decline, my husband's. No saint, Toth says of herself, and I believe her, but I also hope I can do as well when it's my turn again to be a caregiver.

This book doesn't just pull me to the future. I think, too, of those who are caregiving now, who are living this season behind closed doors while I happily go on teaching and writing and shopping for my family's groceries and running my kids to drama rehearsals and activities. I remember how stressed and lonely I was when my mother-in-law was in decline. I remember wishing someone else, anyone, could be the caregiver instead of me. I loved my mother-in-law, but I wanted out.

After friends urge Toth again and again to "have a life" outside the caregiving, she tours care facilities. She knows how James dreads these places, but she also knows that as his dementia grows worse, she may not be equipped to continue caring for him. The social centers and exercise rooms of the nursing homes are ghostly quiet. Toth leaves the nursing homes with a sort of muddled clarity:

How would I feel when I saw James strapped into a wheelchair, perhaps sedated, because no one could be with him every minute to make sure he didn't try to stand up and then fall down? Who would take the time to wash his scalp carefully, gently, every day with a medicated shampoo to alleviate an itchy flakiness that Parkinson's has added to his symptoms?

Toth sees clearly what many of us don't. There is no easy way out.

Thanks to a rotation of paid caregivers, Toth does get out for an hour or two most days to write, to go for a bike ride, to hit a thrift store for a bright T-shirt or new pair of jeans. And she is grateful for her small freedoms.

Much as I admire Toth's caregiving and her writing, I found myself consistently annoyed at certain aspects of the book. In several places, Toth (or her editor) has inserted parenthetical cross-references. In a friendship formed over many cups of coffee, stories are repeated—often with a different insight or detail of memory. When an author refers back to an event earlier in the narrative, the reader feels connection, not irritation. Ah, yes, I remember when you managed to get James down two flights of stairs in his wheelchair, I might think. But Toth has to plop the chapter reference in parentheses (See "The Last Christmas"), pulling me out of her literary spell and reminding me this is, ostensibly, a mostly unedited chronicle. The text is set in Clifford Pro, a font with heavy vertical lines that doesn't reflect the grace of the writing and pathos of the content. And yet, these are the flaws of a friend. Over many cups of coffee, I have come to love this little book.

Why do I wish this book were more polished? Toth is the author of half a dozen lovely, well-received memoirs. The woman has chops. No Saints Around Here is more winsome and eloquent than many of the caregiving books I've read over the past six years. Susan Allen Toth doesn't need to make high art out of what is already complete and finished: the fulfillment of her marriage vows:

The days, weeks, and months passed, and somehow we all managed. To my infinite relief, James never had to go into the nursing home he dreaded. One morning soon after his death, I drove to a nearby coffee shop to meet my widowed and former caregiver friend Barb. As we startled the coffee drinkers around us with our vigorous, pumping high fives, we both had tears in our eyes. We had done it.

Amen.

Lisa Ohlen Harris is the author of The Fifth Season: A Daughter-in-Law's Memoir of Caregiving, published last year by Texas Tech University Press.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Divine reality is like a fugue. All [God's] acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another … . Fix your mind on any one story or any one doctrine and it becomes at once a magnet to which truth and glory come rushing from all levels of being.—C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock

It's not just divine reality that's like a fugue. As Philip Pfatteicher portrays it, the church year is a fugue, too, with all the truth and glory of divine reality rushing toward any one season—or even a single image from that season. In his beautiful book, Journey into the Heart of God: Living the Liturgical Year, he explicates the church year the way the best literary scholars explicate poems, which makes sense because he's (among other things) an English professor. As he would with a great poem, Pfatteicher seeks and finds the many and varied internal resonances among the church seasons and brings them to light for his readers—and it is a beautiful light, one that made me fall more deeply in love with the rich texture of the Christian year.

This is not a book directed primarily to the general reader. It was written for liturgists by a liturgist—one with a deep and wide knowledge of the various prayer books of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran traditions. For example, about the "Sunday within the Octave of Christmas" Pfatteicher writes:

The first reading in Year A was introduced as the (Old Testament) Lesson for the First Sunday after Christmas in the 1958 Lutheran Service Book and Hymnal; the second reading in Year B was appointed in that book, in the 1928 Prayer Book, and in the previous Roman lectionary; the Gospel in Year B was appointed in the Service Book and Hymnal following medieval and the Roman lectionary. The Gospel in Year A is an expansion of the Gospel for the Second Sunday after Christmas Day in the 1928 Prayer Book.

Since I'm not a liturgist myself, this sort of thing made my head spin. Fortunately, though, this detailing of the history of a collect or a lectionary reading is the very least of what this book is about. Pfatteicher includes these details; he never gets lost in them. And he never forgets that they are not the purpose for his writing. It is clear from the flyleaf forward that his primary goal is to open his readers' eyes to the beauty of the liturgical year, its stunning seamlessness, every season, every holy day related to all the others—and he succeeds. I came away from the book with a sense that the church year is less like the circle I had imagined and more like the divine fugue Lewis evokes, with different voices—the seasons and their themes and images—rising to the foreground and then dropping into the background but never disappearing altogether, ready to rise to the forefront again.

This seamlessness is perhaps especially evocative in the often-overlooked season of Epiphany, which comes to vibrant life in Pfatteicher's hands. He shows how Epiphany's primary images of light, manifestation/revelation, baptism, and the miracle at Cana are inherently related to one another, disparate though they may seem at first glance. As one particularly beautiful antiphon for Epiphany has it:

Today the Bridegroom claims his bride, the Church, since Christ has washed away her sins in the waters of the Jordan;
the Magi hasten to the royal wedding;
and the wedding guests rejoice, for Christ has changed water into wine, alleluia.

The light of the star links the theme of light to the epiphany itself, for it is the star that guides the Magi to the Child, Light leading the nations to Christ. Our forebears in the faith understood that the manifestation of God in Christ extends beyond the nations to the natural world. This understanding is still prevalent in the East, where Epiphany and the Baptism of Christ are more closely linked than they are in the West. As Maximus of Turin preached: "Christ is baptized, not to be made holy by the water, but to make the water holy, and by his cleansing to purify the waters which he touched." The final theme of Epiphany, water-to-wine, also plays on the theme of manifestation: "This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory" (John 2:11, ESV). Pfatteicher quotes a 5th-century hymn translated by John Mason Neal:

Oh, what a miracle divine,
When water reddened into wine!
He spoke the word, and forth it flowed
In streams that nature n'er bestowed.

Then he notes, "As Jesus baptized the water in which he was baptized, so too he consecrated the water at the marriage feast. Its transformation showed the surpassing recreation of nature that his passion was to effect."

Hence these Epiphany images echo and reprise themes found in other seasons. The image of light, for instance, dominates the seasons of Advent and Christmas but is not exclusive to them, for it is also a vivid and central image in the Easter season: the light of the risen and ascended Christ. The "water reddened into wine" that flows forth in "streams that nature n'er bestowed" anticipates the crucifixion, when blood and water flow from Jesus' side. These images and themes of Epiphany (and Pfatteicher makes clear it's not just these, but all the images and themes in our liturgical treasury) look both backward and forward in the church year, coming into sharp focus, receding to the background, returning to the fore, but always present.

On Candlemas (February 2), Epiphany ends with the blessing of the candles and the celebration of Jesus' presentation in the temple:

The block of the liturgical year that began with the successive lighting of the candles of the Advent wreath finds its fulfillment in the blessing and procession with lighted candles in the celebration of the arrival of the Lord in his temple.

Simeon's song, when he holds the infant Christ, pays homage to the "light" that "will reveal you [God] to the nations and the glory of your people Israel" (hear the Epiphany echoes), but he does not stop there. He turns to Mary and tells her a sword will pierce her heart. This day looks both backward, to Christmas and Advent, and forward, to Lent and the crucifixion.

Similarly, the final Sunday before Lent (which sometimes falls during Epiphany, sometimes not) is a celebration of the Transfiguration, the icon of which makes the book's cover. This is my favorite feast, and I love that we celebrate it twice every year—first on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday and again on August 6. In the manifestation of Jesus' glory in light and in the Father's commendation, we again see Epiphany themes emerge—even an echo of baptism in the words of the Father. Pfatteicher notes that the Transfiguration commemorates "a stunning manifestation of the glory of Christ and at the same time [serves] as a bridge to Lent, a glimpse of glory before descending into the shadowed valley of the great fast." It also points forward to Christ the King, the final Sunday of the church year, when we celebrate the return of our glorified Lord. Throughout the book, Pfatteicher is continually making such connections, reminding us where we have been, reminding us where we are going, showing us that every season is linked to every other.

Before I conclude, I feel bound to say that for all this book's virtues—and they are many—I wish the copyeditors and proofreaders at Oxford had done their jobs better. I found many typos, spelling and punctuation errors, even a laugh-out-loud oversight. (Jesus' conception, we're told, was "thought to have taken place on April 6, which was also the date of his crucifixion. His birth would have been exactly nine months earlier, January 6.") By the time I was three chapters in (admittedly, they're long chapters), I began to be annoyed by the errors; it seems shameful that a book so beautiful and thought-provoking is riddled with such unnecessary distractions.

Distractions notwithstanding, however, Pfatteicher's book immersed me in the world of the church year to such a depth that several times I found myself moved from mere reading to active worship by the rich language of the prayers and hymns that he liberally includes. The book's title is apt: the church year, especially as Pfatteicher explores and explicates it, is indeed a journey into the heart of God.

Kimberlee Conway Ireton is the author of The Circle of Seasons: Meeting God in the Church Year (InterVarsity Press) and Cracking Up: A Postpartum Faith Crisis (Mason Lewis Press). She lives in Seattle with her husband and four children.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

On a recent weekend trip to New York City, I bolted from Ground Zero over to Wall Street, wanting as little time in the numbing cold as possible, and took refuge in the warmly lit interior of Trinity Episcopal Church for a service of Evening Prayer. Immediately on arriving, I noticed a large advertisem*nt for an upcoming lecture by Sara Miles. Her crinkly, makeup-less smile brightened the banner, eliciting an involuntary smile from me in return, and her name was written in a conspicuously large font. Trinity Wall Street, as it's popularly called, is one of the wealthiest churches in America (its assets are worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 billion). It is—not to put too fine a point on it—the last place on earth Sara Miles would have been seen a few years ago.

Working as a journalist in Nicaragua in her young adulthood, Miles had turned her back on her own country's red-state politics in the Reagan years and embraced an itinerant life. As she describes in her 2007 memoir Take This Bread, she did a stint among Central American revolutionaries and their underground networks, documenting their lives and relentlessly questioning the ease with which her fellow North Americans applied labels like "communism" or "imperialism" in order, as often as not, to be spared the messy business of grappling with genuine human complexity. When she wasn't living in barrios and sharing the fear and physical hunger of her journalistic subjects (their food "always tasted of dirt [or] cheap grease," she said), she worked as a cook in New York. Hers was a life in which she "never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord's Prayer," never had occasion to see or care about stained glass or crucifixes or fonts. And yet, here she was at Trinity Wall Street all those years later, being advertised as a figure of the Episcopal establishment. Or so one could be forgiven for assuming. What gives?

Miles' newest book, City of God: Faith in the Streets, is, in part, about her discomfort with the juxtaposition I've been describing. Now a priest herself, some years after her entirely unexpected conversion at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco at age forty-six, Miles has grown no less uncomfortable with the trappings of ecclesial life than she was in her twenties. "You just don't like church all that much," the rector at her parish recently told her, and she couldn't exactly deny it, despite the fact that she had an office there. In City of God, she tries to dissect her discomfort, exploring why she can't simply consider herself "a solitary 'priest of Jesus,' unencumbered by and superior to the Church that baptized me and gave me communion," but also why she can't easily embrace parish life as-is, without attempting to alter its encumbrances, stretching them into a more outward-oriented, mission-focused shape.

The book describes what is by now a familiar practice among many Anglicans: taking Ash Wednesday services on the road. Miles and some of her fellow clergy, robed in their full clerical vestments, set up tables around the Mission, her neighborhood in San Francisco, and imposed ashes on whomever they could entice into stopping by for a few moments of reflective prayer. Sometimes they would hand out flyers for their church services, and sometimes they would include pointedly political prayers that demonstrated they weren't concerned with an archaic Christian ritual that had nothing to do with social justice. But always there was the thumb dipped in ashes and pressed onto the forehead of the passersby. "Remember that you are dust," Miles would say, tracing the sign of the cross on people's skin, "and to dust you shall return."

The bulk of her book is a collection of stories or brief anecdotes—almost all of them written with artful, exquisite simplicity and unaffected candor, and some of them a good deal more powerful even than that—about the ways she has glimpsed grace and hope in these "Ashes to Go" services. Included, also, is an overarching theological interpretation: By taking ashes to people in the streets, Miles learns that the gospel "isn't rooted in morals: do this, then God will approve … . The good news of Ash Wednesday, the blessing so many people seek so fervently, comes from acknowledging the truth: that we are all going to die"—and that God reaches out to us in that very mortality, not because of our efforts at self-improvement but in spite of them. We must embrace the chaos of the streets, Miles decides, if we hope to have a chance of understanding what God is doing in the serenity of the liturgy.

To her credit, Miles incorporates dissenting voices in her narrative. She quotes one critic as saying, "Taking the imposition of ashes out of a liturgical context that includes scripture readings, the invitation to a holy Lent, and the litany of penitence, there is no insistence on the reality of sin or any call to repentance." In the interest of full disclosure, as an Anglican of a very traditional sort myself, I should confess that I share this worry. I fret over whether "Ashes to Go" reduces Christian symbolism to its lowest common denominator, watering down the call of the gospel to name Jesus as rescuer but also judge. Still, I have to admit that ashes have never been considered a sacrament in the Christian tradition, and imposing them on pedestrians is not the same thing as if one were taking the Eucharist to the market square and offering it on the spot to anyone who wanted it. And perhaps ashes—simple and almost caustically stark; a reminder of mortality—are the ideal gateway drug to lure people into a full-fledged Christian faith. Perhaps "Ashes to Go" will be the thing that causes some people to receive, say, "Baptism to Stay." As an Episcopal bishop friend of mine once put it, after his first experiment with the practice, "I see Ashes to Go as a sort of 'pre-evangelism.' "

For Miles, taking part in this unconventional form of pre-evangelism has, she says, re-evangelized her. After several years of street-side Ash Wednesday liturgies, she is better able to picture the heavenly city the way she believes it will actually look—"like the 'New Jerusalem' bodega run by Syrian Christians that I trudge past on my way to work, its dingy pink front plastered over with Miller beer signs, its enthusiastic, unshaven owner waving and smiling each new day as he opens the door to welcome in a straggling, polyglot parade of schoolkids, nurses, winos, and day laborers." Reading that, I can't help but recall the ending of "Revelation" by Flannery O'Connor, in which Mrs. Turpin receives a vision of "a vast horde of souls … rumbling toward heaven": "whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black nigg*rs in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs"—the population of the city of God. That vision of a motley contingent of pilgrims, foreheads all bedaubed with ashes, making their way to their celestial habitation is the gospel Miles has heard afresh. That's the substance of her renewed eschatological hope.

This past Ash Wednesday, for the first time, I participated in an Ashes to Go service of sorts, although not on the street but in a hospital. After ducking out early from the morning Eucharist at the seminary where I teach, I scrubbed the ashes from my forehead, got in my car, and drove to the Hillman Cancer Center in Pittsburgh, where I met my priest friend Sean. Together with another friend, we took the elevator to the seventh floor and found our beloved colleague and friend Martha's room. Diagnosed a couple of months earlier with acute myeloid leukemia, she was beginning to show signs of her three rounds of chemotherapy. Her arms were reddened with rashes, and her bald head was shawled with a hand-knit scarf. She was visibly weakened, but I smiled at the photo on her wall, taken several weeks earlier on a visit to an antique store during which she had donned a facsimile of a Roman soldier's helmet and brandished a broadsword, teeth clenched in mock rage. There was still plenty of fight left in her, I said, and she agreed.

After some chitchat, we opened our prayer books and read the penitential liturgy. Then Sean read the epistle: "We are treated as … dying, and behold, we live." As Sean pressed his sooty dark thumb onto Martha's taut, too-shiny skin, I bit my lower lip. Never had the apostle's words seemed so immediately, obviously convincing to me. Rarely had the gospel seemed so stunningly addressed to real human need. "To dust you shall return," Sean intoned in his deep, uninflected voice. Yes, I thought, but not for good.

As we left the hospital room, I pulled out my phone and tweeted: "If I'm getting ashes to go, a hospital is the place I want to get them."

I think that's what Sara Miles is trying to say, too.

Wesley Hill is assistant professor of biblical studies at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. His next book, Paul and the Trinity, is forthcoming from Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The series Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible has as its goal an interpretation of the Old and New Testaments according to an overall theological understanding, as opposed to piecemeal exegesis based on supposedly unprejudiced historical criticism and philology. Where is this understanding, this "rule of faith," to be found? Primarily in the Nicene creed. And where are examples of biblical interpretation based on the rule of faith to be found? Primarily in what the Series Preface calls "the great cloud of premodern interpreters," though the series aims to add to their number.

It is said that the need for a rule of faith to guide interpretation arises out of the Bible as "vast, heterogeneous, full of confusing passages and obscure words, and difficult to understand." So absent a rule of faith, the doctrine of Scripture's clarity suffers deeper-than-usual qualification. Yet not only is the content of this rule of faith admittedly a subject of debate. Even one and the same early church father Irenaeus used "terms and formulations" that "shift[ed]" from time to time and from circ*mstance to circ*mstance. Also questionable is the legitimacy of equating a "rule of faith" with a "creed."[1] Nevertheless, says the series editor R. R. Reno, figures so diverse as Gregory the Great, Bonaventure, John Calvin, and Hans Urs von Balthasar (among many others) agree that the rule of faith includes at least "the covenant with Israel, the coming of Christ, [and] the gathering of the nations into the church." Put more specifically, "God the Father … sends his only begotten Son to die for us and for our salvation" and "raises the crucified Son in the power of the Holy Spirit so that the baptized may be joined in one body." Despite disagreements over details, then, and against the view that doctrine has encrusted the biblical text and thereby obscured its meaning, the Brazos series regards the doctrine represented by the rule of faith/Nicene tradition as clarifying the Bible's meaning.

To what extent, then, has the rule of faith/Nicene tradition affected Christopher Seitz's comments on the apostle Paul's letter to the Colossians in ways that differentiate this commentary from typically "modern" commentaries on Colossians? And whatever its extent, has the differentiation helped or hurt our understanding of Colossians? (I leave to philosophers the question, How can we recognize help and hurt?)

Though most commentators in the Brazos series are theologians, Seitz is a biblical scholar, but not in the field of New Testament studies—rather, in that of Old Testament studies. His theological interests shine brightly, however, as evident for example in his frequent citations of early church fathers, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, and other theologically attuned premoderns (though not to the exclusion of modern commentators), and also in his devotion to canonical interpretation, that is, to relating the message of Colossians to other sectors of Scripture, and vice versa. Because of an overarching rule of faith, the tendency is (admittedly on Seitz's part) to minimize distinctiveness in a letter like Colossians and to amalgamate Colossians with the rest of Scripture, in this case especially with Paul's other letters and most especially with his other prison epistles: Ephesians (above all), Philemon, and (somewhat) Philippians.

Naturally, such an amalgamation inclines Seitz toward Pauline authorship of Colossians and Ephesians (disputed in higher critical circles because of differences from undisputed Paulines like Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, and Galatians) as well as of Philemon and Philippians (likewise undisputed). Yet Seitz supports his inclination with standard higher critical arguments. And good ones they are, beginning with what is meant by authorship in reference to ancient practices of writing. Those who doubt Paul's authorship of Colossians should consider carefully and especially Seitz's setting out the problems of harmonizing a theory of pseudepigraphy with the thick interpersonal elements in Colossians 4.

In line with his devotion to canon-criticism, Seitz discusses the present canonical order of Paul's letters; but it is hard to see that this order materially affects his interpretation of Paul's text. Chronology, common authorship, and identical or similar circ*mstances seem much more decisive, just as in noncanonical but conservative higher critical interpretations.

Against the opinion of many scholars, however, Seitz deemphasizes Paul's authorial intention to correct the so-called "Colossian heresy" of which Epaphras is thought to have informed him. This deemphasis could be credited to Seitz's rule-of-faith and canon-critical tendency toward amalgamation, so that the specificity of a Colossian heresy recedes. But Seitz argues more exegetically within the letter's confines than on the larger canvas of the canon, and does so by appealing to Paul's starting the letter with autobiographical and christological notes before mentioning any possible elements in a Colossian heresy. The highly christological passage in 1:15-20 can be taken, nevertheless, as a deft, preliminary counter-blow against a heretical demotion of Christ; and the introductory autobiographical notes can be taken as Paul's portraying himself as an authoritative and reliable corrector of a heresy about which he has been informed. After all, he had neither founded nor visited the church in Colossae and therefore needed to establish his bona fides.

Seitz goes so far as to propose that "Paul is writing a letter whose occasion is borne of his own self-reflection and a new understanding of his apostleship in Christ, the result of prayer and companionship in prison, in the later years of his life." That is to say, Paul reflects on the change in his apostleship from itinerant evangelism to prayer and letter-writing. But he had been in prison before and written letters during itineration, and in another prison epistle he looks forward to further itineration (see Phil. 2:24).

Undeterred, though, Seitz proposes additionally that Paul had come to the surprising realization that his letters would be collected and enjoy a scriptural afterlife for the whole church. Apparently, then, the expectation of a soon return of Christ had waned (contrast Phil. 4:5b). Seitz compares the collection with that of the twelve minor prophets, and compares the respective locations of these collections within the larger divisions of Old and New Testaments.

One can wholeheartedly agree that we should not read Paul's letters in isolation from each other, or from the rest of Scripture; but resistance to their individual peculiarities threatens to take away theological particulars in favor of theological generalities. If so it happens, the result will be a head-in-the-clouds rule of faith rather than the down-to-earth practicalities of belief and behavior. Think here of the difference between expository preaching, which ties itself to the specifics of the biblical text seriatim, and topical preaching, which even at its best tends to limit itself to the high points of the rule of faith as crystallized in the Nicene creed—which, as N. T. Wright likes to point out, omits the entirety of Jesus' teaching about the kingdom of God. To be fair, Seitz does not want such a heady, impractical result; but his emphasis tends in the direction of a relatively minimal though robust rule of faith.

Back to the collection of Paul's letters, including Colossians: Seitz writes in an appendix a lengthy paraphrase in Paul's own words, not his actual words but words as Seitz imagines them to be in a supposed cover letter accompanying both Colossians and a letter coming to Colossae from Laodicea (Col. 4:16). In the paraphrase Paul references his memorization of the earlier Scriptures both in the original Hebrew and in Greek translation (the Septuagint), compares his letters to the twelve minor prophets, casts the letters as ecclesiologically inclusive rather than limited to the local churches addressed, takes responsibility for ordering the letters in a collection so as to give Romans pride of place as a prologue to his remaining letters, and even intimates that he urged Peter, James, and John to take up a ministry of letter-writing just as he has done.

As an Old Testament scholar and devotee of canon-criticism after the pattern of his teacher Brevard Childs, Seitz wrestles repeatedly with the absence from Colossians of explicit quotations of the Old Testament. Naturally, this absence poses something of a problem in a view that wants to amalgamate the books of the Bible with each other. By way of contrast, the Greek for "the Bible," ta biblia, means "the books" and by means of a plural underlines scriptural variety. So Seitz has to satisfy himself with saying that "the [Old Testament] scriptures are declaring their own christological purpose … in a way that Paul may only partly comprehend but not fully track or encompass." Yet "through careful study" we can surpass Paul in comprehension.

To this explanation, Seitz adds that Paul's audience in Colossae, consisting at least mainly of non-Jews, did not know the Old Testament and therefore would not have resonated with quotations therefrom. But Paul quotes the Old Testament extensively and argues from it repeatedly in Romans and Galatians, both of which were addressed to largely non-Jewish audiences. One may therefore be excused for thinking it still a problem that Colossians does not contain so much as one explicit quotation of the Old Testament.

Surprisingly, given his expertise in the Old Testament and devotion to canon-criticism, Seitz does not take up C. F. Burney's article, "Christ as the 'Aρχή of Creation," in comments on "the Christ hymn" of Colossians 1:15-20. Seitz does describe the article as "astonishingly fresh and full of insight," but does not tell what that insight is. According to Burney, Paul played on the multiple meanings—"beginning," "firstborn," and "head"—of the very first Hebrew word (a noun) in Genesis 1:1, and on the multiple meanings—"through," "in," and "for"—of the Hebrew preposition prefixed to that noun.[2]

On the whole, though, Seitz offers a wealth of canonical and theological commentary on the text of Colossians. One may disagree at points: for example, in his surprising denial that "bodily" in 2:9 refers to the specifics of the incarnation and in his affirmation of the cruciality of baptism as the means by which the Holy Spirit transforms us (including babies?). But such disagreements pale before a vast array of wide-ranging, perceptive comments. By and large, readers will be enriched both theologically and historically.

For Seitz, then, has the rule of faith clarified the meaning of Paul's text? Whatever Seitz might say, I would say that for him as well as for me, Paul's text clarifies the meaning of the rule of faith and along with the rest of Scripture stands in judgment over the many rules of faith that now exist. For the manifold creedal statements of innumerable Christian institutions amount to rules of faith. If it be objected that the meaning of the biblical text is subject to disagreements that call for adjudication by a rule of faith, it may be answered that the meaning of a rule of faith, including the earliest such rule (whatever that was), is likewise subject to disagreements that call for adjudication by Scripture. So the question boils down to one of priority, Scripture versus a rule of faith, whether in respect to chronology or in respect to importance. Here you see the difference between an Episcopalian, like Seitz, and Reno, an Episcopalian-turned-Roman Catholic, on the one hand, and a Baptist, like me, on the other hand. But happily for me, Seitz's commentary, while paying due attention to the history and importance of theological interpretation as represented in the Nicene tradition, seems to prioritize the scriptural text. Well done!

Robert Gundry is scholar-in-residence and professor emeritus at Westmont College.

1. See Everett Ferguson, Church History (Zondervan, 2005), Vol. 1, pp. 109?112.

2. Burney's article was published in Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. 27 (1926), pp. 160-77. When moving into a semidetached house in Manchester, England, to start doctoral work, I found on a desk in the living room a penholder inscribed with the name "C. F. Burney." Being even more ignorant then than I am now, I trashed it, only to discover later the significance of that name in New Testament scholarship.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Christianity turns on a number of paradoxes. The Christian God is both imminent and transcendent; Jesus Christ is both human and divine; his Kingdom both has and has not yet arrived. These various internal tensions have proven immensely productive for anthropologists, and here Matthew Engelke is no exception. Engelke's first monograph, A Problem of Presence, examined how Apostolic Christians in Zimbabwe navigate the simultaneous proximity and distance of God by seeking direct experiences of the Holy Spirit, so much so that they reject all forms of mediation, including the biblical text. Engelke's new book, God's Agents, explores a very different group of Christians (with, it must be said, a very different relationship to Scripture), the British and Foreign Bible Society.

Engelke has already established himself as a skilful ethnographic writer, and in God's Agents he is in fine form. It is not easy to create compelling descriptions of the mundane workings of a nonprofit organization, but in this book even board meetings and the drafting of press releases are made to matter because Engelke has situated them in a game with stakes we've come to appreciate. In addition to ethnographic description and the firsthand narrations of his informants (as anthropologists call the people they study), the text is dotted with quotations from newspaper articles and blogs, as well as the words of Christian writers who have influenced the Bible society staff. These voices give the book a texture that extends the analysis beyond a particular Christian organization to contemporary Britain more generally. One of the primary implications of this wider focus is that God's Agents is very much an ethnography of secularism. What we learn from Engelke's analysis is that the secular is multifaceted, and that the Bible society has a long and complicated relationship with it.

Engelke focuses on the work of the Bible society at home in Britain, much of which amounts to "Bible advocacy," attempts to convince an increasingly indifferent public that the Bible, and Christianity more generally, have not become irrelevant. These goals point to the most obvious way that the Bible society understands and engages with the secular, namely as secularism—that is, the exclusion of religion from public life. The barrier between these spheres is something that the Bible society hopes to break down. In what is perhaps true British fashion, they often seek to do so not by direct confrontation, but rather by creating what Engelke calls "ambient faith." Efforts toward this end include a Christmastime display of angels at a Swindon shopping center and a series of Bible studies designed to be done in pubs or cafes as a means of "getting the Word out." Angels fluttering above a Marks & Spencer or a group of people reading 1 Corinthians over coffee are meant to challenge the distinction between what is public and what is private that defines this particular reading of secularism. The long-term hope of Bible advocacy is that eventually such efforts might render this distinction unnecessary, that religion will not be only public or private but everywhere, thoroughgoing in its presence.

In this first reading of the term, the "secular" is no friend to Christianity, and Bible advocacy aims to eat away at its territory, bringing religious ideas and actions into spaces not usually marked as religious. At the same time, people at the Bible society are keen to use linguistic and aesthetic markers from outside the church (i.e., from the "secular" world, in the above sense). For example, a massive advertising campaign in Manchester presented biblical narratives in the language of newspaper headlines in hopes of sparking public interest in the Bible. Seen from this angle, the secular is a repository of resources to be mined in the service of Bible advocacy, a source of possibilities as much as problems.

Under certain circ*mstances, the "secular" can even be incorporated into a public Christian position. Engelke devotes the last three chapters of his book to Theos, the Christian think tank launched and partially funded by the Bible society. In its first publication, Theos staked a claim in the public square by arguing that the secular public square is itself a Christian legacy. In this argument, the charge to give to Caesar that which is Caesar's makes sense only if Caesar's rule is encompassed by the rule of Christ; it was Christ's overarching authority that therefore made the idea of the secular possible in Western thought. Insofar as this is the case, "Jesus was, in a way, a secularist."

While the Bible society has to be "church-facing" in much of its work, first and foremost because it depends on the financial support of churches, Theos works hard to distance itself from certain kinds of Christians. Of particular concern is the "nutters brigade," to use one oft-quoted epithet—the sort of Christians who might picket an art exhibition or theatrical performance because they find the content offensive. The best example of Theos' carefully charted line is the "Rescuing Darwin" campaign, which coincided with the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth—and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of the Species—in 2009. Through a series of reports and public events, Theos sought to rescue Darwin from both the antitheism of the New Atheists, who often use him as a battering ram in their fight against religion, and the anti-intellectualism of creationists and proponents of Intelligent Design, who see Darwin as wielding his own battering ram against their faith. Theos' aim was to demonstrate that Darwin did not think that his theory was antithetical to religious commitment. "Rescuing Darwin" emphasized the possibility that Christianity and natural selection were not mutually exclusive, primarily because they respond to different types of questions. Here again, we see one of the cardinal principles of secularism at work, the cordoning off of religious belief to certain domains of life, where faith, rather than science, is paramount. In "Rescuing Darwin," then, "reasonable religion works with rather than against the epistemological divisions set up in the eighteenth century." The secular is not only made to serve religious ends, but is domesticated by Christian faith.

Given these various readings of the secular, it should come as no surprise that in Engelke's analysis people at the Bible society emerge as deeply ambivalent about it. In their efforts to dismantle it, they have wound up using many of its parts. The result is that those at the Bible society are, in fact, very much like the people they are trying to influence. These Christians have become all things to all people, as Scripture puts it, so much so that "the trajectory of these evangelically minded social actors is only a few degrees different from the perceived norm"—a critique that, incidentally, has been leveled at the Bible society by other British Christians. Engelke is clear that for Bible society advocates, this sort of capitulation to "the world" is a means to an end, "a sacrifice today to the secular in the service of tomorrow for salvation." As such, he concludes, their work tells us something important about "publicity," about what it takes to be able to participate in public discourse in the contemporary West, about "the fine line between being able to have a conversation and to shape that conversation."

One of the most helpful insights that Engelke draws from this analysis has to do with the way that contemporary Christians, especially evangelicals, understand culture, a topic that they spend a great deal of time talking about. Whereas the opposite of culture in anthropological thought is generally nature, when Christians speak of culture (especially "the culture") they typically oppose it to the church. While anthropologists would see Christianity as part of culture, evangelicals often view the church as outside "the culture." This observation helps us see Engelke's conclusion—that people at the Bible society are deeply embedded in secular paradigms—as more than a simple "gotcha" move that reveals Christians to be something they would likely claim, or at least hope, they are not. Instead, what Engelke offers is a careful tracing of what it means for British Christianity to be British, and to stake out a position for itself in British public life. His analysis explores the difficulty of being both in the world and not of it. This, of course, is another of Christianity's core tensions. What God's Agents provides us is therefore an important new example of how Christians work to navigate their paradoxical religion.

Naomi Haynes is a Chancellor's Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Moving by the Spirit: Pentecostalism, Social Life, and Political Economy on the Zambian Copperbelt.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

The novel of religious faith—or, rather, its disappearance—has been much in the literary news lately. Since the death of Walker Percy a quarter century ago, no American novelist of comparable stature has emerged, it is said, to pack flesh and blood onto the life-altering experience of "something beyond myself" (as the British novelist Muriel Spark shyly described the religious sensation). The last American fiction writer to shout her Christian convictions at the top of her voice was Flannery O'Connor. But now, it is said, while ordinary Christians may bellow from pulpits and political rallies, American fiction has become like the churches of Europe—hushed and almost empty of believers.

The main combatants in this cultural clash have been Paul Elie, author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own (a 2003 collective biography of four postwar Catholic writers), and Gregory Wolfe, editor of Image, a literary journal founded to publish work concerned with the faith traditions of the West. A year and a half ago, Elie declared in the New York Times Book Review that religious belief shows up in contemporary fiction, if at all, merely "as something between a dead language and a hangover." Great religious novels like The Brothers Karamazov and Brideshead Revisted are barren of living offspring—except perhaps for the novel Elie admitted that he himself was in the process of writing. Replying in The Wall Street Journal, Gregory Wolfe scolded him for looking in all the wrong places for the wrong thing. "[W]e live in a postmodern world, where any grand narrative is suspect, where institutions are seen as oppressive," Wolfe said. "Indeed, one of the most ancient religious ideas is that grace works in obscure, mysterious ways."

I find myself on Wolfe's side, and not merely because he quoted me in the Journal. Elie commits the error that so many commit in talking about religion: he reduces it to the confession of belief, which must be uttered in a voice loud enough to be heard over the fashionable din. But there is plenty of perfectly good religious fiction, Wolfe reminded Elie, which conveys its faith in "whispers rather than shouts." Elie was dismissive. Why the need to whisper? "It's not like we're in England or Mexico where priests are being hunted," he scoffed in a later interview. But this misses the point. Although religion in what Terry Eagleton calls its "doctrinal inflection" may once have appealed to intellectuals and writers like T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, and Robert Lowell, for whom conversion was a reawakening of the mind, it no longer does so. The generation of young Americans just now rising to notice is surrounded by an intellectual élite which jeers that religious belief is the death of intelligence. For the Roman Catholics among them, the scandal of clerical sex abuse was an occasion of profound disgust, which led even the most devout to muzzle their faith. The public display of religion has come to seem as false and insincere as public displays of affection.

It doesn't follow that provocative and satisfying religious fiction is not still being written. Perhaps the best examples are the work of two young Catholic novelists still in their thirties—William Giraldi and Christopher Beha. They established themselves immediately with first novels of extraordinary power and prowess. Giraldi's Busy Monsters (2011) chronicles the spiritual adventures of a lapsed Catholic ("the most devout Catholic of all") who crosses the "line into a whole new mode of existence"—murder, mayhem, the search for Big Foot and ghosts and ufos. Written in the facetious style of the early Evelyn Waugh, Giraldi's novel nevertheless has a serious Christian purpose. It explores the emptiness of postmodern lives: "Our silent Savior's broken body: in that believe? How? Which way? Is it each way? But we can't hold it. So in the lifetime of our discontent we worship one another and then wither when left." Busy Monsters has already been listed by one critic among the 100 greatest Catholic novels of all time.

Beha's What Happened to Sophie Wilder was the best American novel of 2012, although it was shamefully overlooked by the publicists and buzz-mongers who hand out the annual book prizes. A brazen attempt to revive the saint's life as a literary genre in an age of unbelief, Beha's novel also dramatizes the enigma of Christian humility when viewed from a secular perspective. After the experience of being "taken over" by the Holy Spirit during mass at a small church, Sophie Wilder renounces her past enthusiasms and devotes herself to the care of her dying father-in-law. She is gennathei anothen—"not 'born again,' exactly, but 'born from above.'" What happens to her as a consequence is so foreign to postmodern sensibility that an alternative ending must be written. The result is a two-sided novel of unforgettable insight into the religious life.

Two years later Beha (pronounced bay-uh), now 34, has written a sequel in which the Catholic religion is an undertone, but like a ringing in the ears. Set in the Manhattan of the present day, Arts and Entertainments is a 21st-century Faust written in the style of Muriel Spark. It tells the story of Eddie Hartley, a washed-out television actor who teaches drama at St. Albert's, a prep school on the Upper East Side for Catholics who had "finally arrived in the higher reaches of society and wanted their own version of the private schools where rich Protestants sent their sons." Ten years after he himself graduated from St. Albert's, "Handsome Eddie" is married but childless, although he and his wife, Susan—an Ohio girl who works in an art gallery—have "actually been trying for a while." In desperation they have resorted to artificial reproduction, so far unsuccessfully, but since it is not covered by their medical insurance, the young couple are "out of pocket more than ten grand in the past six months," and are now broke.

Eddie's friend Max Blakeman offers to help. A "lit scenester" who performed a similar Pandarus-like role in What Happened to Sophie Wilder, Blakeman sets Eddie up with Morgan Bench, a self-described "meme evangelist" and internet entrepreneur. Bench has heard that Eddie has some old videos of his ex-girlfriend Martha Martin, the star of a five-years-running television show about a miracle-working doctor. A "real beauty, a rarity," Martha is also a celebrity whose image is everywhere—on the 24-hour entertainment channels, in newspapers and online, on the sides of buses. It doesn't take long for Eddie to overcome his initial reluctance and peddle a sex tape for one hundred thousand dollars. He uses the windfall to pay for his wife's in-vitro fertilization. Within a few weeks, Susan is pregnant with triplets.

Although Eddie has carefully removed any evidence of himself from the tape, it is quickly traced back to him when it goes viral. St. Albert's fires him. Camera crews stake out his apartment building. Susan kicks him out, flinging his belongings from an upstairs window as the news photographers click away. The scene is on the front page of the Daily News the next morning. Suddenly, Eddie finds himself in demand as he never was as an actor. Celebrity magazines and talk shows offer him five figures for his side of the story. "You've got a shot at fame here," his agent tells him—on reality tv. But only in a show featuring both him and Susan.

When Eddie balks ("I want to be on television," he says, "just not like that"), Susan does the show by herself. Desperately Expecting Susan it is called. She becomes a "darling" of the "celebrity world." And before he knows it, Eddie is cast as the unwilling antagonist of Susan's wildly popular story. He is discussed and derided on chat boards, his comings and goings reported on gossip sites, his future with Susan voted on in online polls. Magazine "spies" lie in wait to snap his picture in embarrassing get-ups and poses. He cannot venture outside his hotel room without becoming the object of public fascination. Eddie begins to feel "like a man awaiting trial in a police state."

So he decides to fight back. Enlisting a 19-year-old girl to pretend to be his new girl-friend, Eddie works his way back into the story. He is recast as the "boy toy" of a "teen tart." And sure enough, the producers of Desperately Expecting Susan react by wanting him on the show—not to reunite with his wife, which is Eddie's plan, but as a "separate storyline," the "cad and the nymphet." "It's going to be great for the ratings," Eddie is reassured. A television crew is assigned to film his every move. Eddie realizes he will now "have to stay forever in character." Although he tries to keep his "inner self" private ("they couldn't film his mind," he tells himself), Eddie soon discovers that he is "walking through a world that had been meticulously constructed only so that he could walk through it." Even when he performs the turn from cad to saint, even when he finally gets his wife back, Eddie knows he will never get his life back. Reality tv has bought it, and it belongs to reality tv. The novel ends with the reminder that Eddie and Susan will always be watched.

It ought to be clear by now that Beha serves up reality tv as a parody, or travesty, of divine providence. Eddie Hartley may exercise freedom of will, but only within the narrow limits of what reality tv will permit. Otherwise he will be banished to hell. "Do you know what hell is?" the producer of Desperately Expecting Susan asks him. "Getting taken off the air." Eddie laughs, but in an age of unbelief, the television audience is what exists in place of God: "Never visible, but always present. Many and one at the same time."

Things might have been different. Susan is a mass-going Catholic, not "ostentatious about her faith" but also not able to "enter a church without saying at least a short prayer." As a ten-year-old, Eddie himself had been an altar boy at his parents' parish in Queens. Just once,

he had experienced a single unforgettable moment of what adults might call transcendence, when his whole body buzzed with the presence of something other than himself, a moment he had never talked about to anyone and didn't like to think about now, because it still seemed unmistakably real to Eddie and didn't make any sense to him.

Instead, Eddie tries to find substitutes for transcendence in acting ("Something like that feeling had sometimes visited him while he was onstage"), and it remains without religious significance for him: "If asked, he would have said he was Catholic, just as he would have said he was Irish—it was a matter of birth, not of action or belief." Everything that happens to him after peddling the sex tape happens because of his failure to make "that feeling" the basis of action or belief. Like so many of his contemporaries, he prefers fame and the buzz to God.

Unlike Beha, who describes himself as a "believing and practicing Catholic," William Giraldi long ago "abandoned doctrinal Catholicism completely." What has remained with him is its worldview, the mythos that shapes a Catholic's vision and understanding from the cradle. Although the style of his second novel differs from his first as much as a serial killer differs from a bright ironical hipster, Hold the Dark is equally concerned with the beyond, the farthest reaches of the human experience. Giraldi, not quite 40, transplants the Southern violence of Flannery O'Connor and the late William Gay (about whom he wrote the first comprehensive treatment for The Southern Review) to the wilds of Alaska, the "edge of the interior," a place which "obliterates the imagination," where no doctrine of the soul will save anyone.

Hold the Dark opens with wolves coming down from the uninhabited hills and taking the children of an isolated village. After Medora Slone's son, Bailey, becomes the third child to be taken—so she reports—she contacts the nature journalist Russell Core, author of a bestseller about living among gray wolves, and solicits his help in retrieving her son's body. Without knowing exactly why he is doing so, Core travels to Alaska to explain the wolf attacks, if he can. "The explanation is that we're cursed here," Medora says. What she wants, she tells him, is for Core to track the murderous wolf and kill it.

After examining the scenes of the three attacks and then spending the night with Medora in his bed, Core departs the next morning to hunt the wolves. But not before he is confronted by a bent old Yup'ik woman, reputed to be a witch, who warns him that he is seeking the wrong prey. "You would bar the door against the wolf," she says, "why not more against beasts with the souls of damned men, against men who would damn themselves to beasts?" She urges Core to leave the village, but he ignores her and treks into the hills. There he locates the pack of wolves "only days away from starving." Instead of killing one and dragging it back to the village, Core fires in the air and scatters the wolves. He decides to tell Medora they have fled: "Remind her that what was done could not be undone, that blood does not wash blood."

When he returns to the village, Medora is nowhere to be found. (Scattered clothes suggest she has left in haste.) In her basem*nt, he comes upon the body of her son, wrapped in a coarse woolen blanket. Core struggles to "remember prayers he'd discarded long before this night." He is unable to offer much assistance to the police. He has no explanation for why Medora might have killed her own son: "The annals of human wisdom fall silent," he reflects (or perhaps it is Giraldi), "when faced with the feral in us."

Two weeks later, Medora's husband Vernon Slone returns home after being wounded in Iraq, bent upon repaying blood with blood. His revenge, however, seems indiscriminate at first. He murders two policemen, then the coroner. He steals his son's body and carries it into the hills, clearing snow away from an embankment for a temporary tomb until he can bury the boy properly in the spring. He returns to his native village only long enough to murder the old witch ("Take your wrath to the gods, to the wolves," she warns him, "not an old woman," but he does not listen), and then he drives off in search of his wife.

What follows is an archive of bloodshed. Giraldi does not dwell upon the gore; he finds nothing erotic about violent death; but corpses rapidly pile up—14 in all—as if they were the tabulation of Slone's quest. Shortly before going to Iraq, Slone had tried to explain to his son that the teaching "to kill any people is bad" is in fact a "lie." "There are good people who won't hurt you and there are bad people who will," Slone says. "It's good to kill bad people?" his son asks. "If you have to," Slone replies. But good and bad, moral approval and disapproval, are not at issue in Hold the Dark. In Giraldi's telling, the Alaskan wild is marked by a "fundamental otherness." The people who are native to that land must live with the "dread that there are forces in this world you cannot digest or ever hope to have hints of."

Eventually Slone tracks down his wife, but he does not kill her. Instead he retreats with her even farther from "the annals of human wisdom." Is the curse removed from the land by their self-exile? Not even Slone is sure. Reflecting upon everything that has happened, the wolf writer Core begins to understand that "man belongs neither in civilization nor nature." The truth is that men are "aberrations between two states of being." In that "limbo between worlds where language failed," the fundamental certitude of the human experience is to be found; and the certitude is bloody. Not for Giraldi the conception of religion in fiction as advanced by Flannery O'Connor. Religious truth is not merely an "added dimension" but the substructure of reality itself. The incarnation and the broken body of the man-god are brute facts of the world, very nearly definitive of it. If Christ's blood was "shed profusely in the scourging" and "poured out on the cross" (to quote the Church's litany of the precious blood), why should anyone be surprised at the bloodbaths men create in order to seek out, again and again, the salvific torture of the flesh?

Neither Christopher Beha nor William Giraldi is a Catholic novelist in the simplistic sense of dressing up Catholic doctrine with what Paul Elie calls "the old power to persuade." Nor is either of them a Catholic apologist in any form. They are not trying to defend the Catholic religion nor even to make it plausible for readers likely to reject it. They are Catholic novelists for all that, however, with a literary project far more profound—to display religion as inextricably woven into human life, or what the great Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have described as its "inscape." They are nothing like each other, their religious convictions are nothing alike, but between them Beha and Giraldi are redefining how religious fiction, especially Catholic fiction, might be written by those with small need to shout.

Religion is not like baseball. There are no baseball novels; there are only novels about baseball. True, a novel may be about religious faith, although to say this is to say very little about it—crucially, it is to say nothing whatever about the novel's point of view toward religious faith. The greatest religious novels are written out of a religious discernment much the same way that surrealistic poetry is written out of a particular vision of reality: it soaks the work from top to bottom. Critics may go on complaining of a lack, but those who are looking for religious fiction written from the ground up should find themselves copies of the striking recent novels by William Giraldi and Christopher Beha.

D. G. Myers is the author of The Elephants Teach (Univ. of Chicago Press). An English professor for 24 years at Texas A&M and Ohio State universities, he has published essays and reviews in Commentary, Image, Philosophy and Literature, the Sewanee Review, and elsewhere. He is an Orthodox Jew.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I have one word to say upon the subject of profound writers, who are grown very numerous of late; and I know very well the judicious world is resolved to list me in that number. I conceive therefore, as to the business of being profound, that it is with writers as with wells—a person with good eyes may see to the bottom of the deepest, provided any water be there: and often when there is nothing in the world at the bottom besides dryness and dirt, though it be but a yard and a-half under-ground, it shall pass, however, for wondrous deep upon no wiser reason than because it is wondrous dark.—A Tale of a Tub

So pronounces the fictional hack author of A Tale of a Tub, Jonathan Swift's most brilliant and—dare I say it? profound—work, a 1704 satire on modern abuses of religion and learning, and on all those daring to think themselves immune to such. This chaotic, digressive, function-following-form masterpiece smashes what Swift saw as the false idols of his day: nominalism and materialism, sectarianism and scientism, systematizers and "projectors," pretended wit and religious zealotry, hack writing and facile hermeneutics—to name a few.

If there were just one author I wish all thoughtful Christians would read, it would be Jonathan Swift, who lived from 1667 to 1745. Despite his secure place in the canon of great literature, Swift might be one of the most under-read and under-appreciated writers therein. Harold Bloom, whose literary and religious proclivities are the antitheses of Swift's, proclaims in his book Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds that he rereads A Tale of a Tub "twice a year, religiously, because it devastates and is so good for me." It is, Bloom writes, "the most salutary corrective for someone of visionary tendencies or Romantic enthusiasms."

It's a corrective for the rest of us, too. In particular, the allegorical portions of the work, centered on the tale of three feuding brothers—Jack (symbolizing John Calvin), Martin (Luther), and Peter (the Roman Church)—have particular resonance for the ever-fracturing subsets of contemporary Christendom. Yet this is not the simple allegory of Bunyan: Swift's is an incarnational satire. He creates personas that embody the very follies and excesses he critiques. By purposefully confusing surface with depth, inner with outer, material with spiritual, Swift inverses, reverses, and conflates all these, implicating the reader in the conflations and forcing her to do the hard work of discerning truth from error and wisdom from folly. As the hack narrator of A Tale of a Tub dubiously puts it:

[W]isdom is a fox, who, after long hunting, will at last cost you the pains to dig out. It is a cheese which, by how much the richer, has the thicker, the homelier, and the coarser coat, and whereof to a judicious palate the maggots are the best. It is a sack-posset, wherein the deeper you go you will find it the sweeter. Wisdom is a hen whose cackling we must value and consider, because it is attended with an egg. But then, lastly, it is a nut, which, unless you choose with judgment, may cost you a tooth, and pay you with nothing but a worm.

If this isn't enticing enough to send you straight to Swift, then do read Leo Damrosch's compelling biography, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World, published last year by Yale University Press and a finalist for this year's Pulitzer Prize in biography. Here is a book to delight and instruct both the general reader and the specialist. Damrosch masterfully fleshes out the fascinating and complex life of this Anglican clergyman, champion of the oppressed Irish, and brilliant satirist who lived in an age equally fascinating and complex.

The chapter on London, for example, cannot fail to interest any reader who cares a whit about history, humanity, or even basic hygiene. Much about Swift's compulsions—both literary and personal—makes greater sense when the reader has even a rudimentary understanding of how significantly the pervasiveness of human waste affected the flavor of urban life in the 18th century. Damrosch answers this need, and so many others, quite nicely, deftly placing Swift in the context of his time and offering many delicious tidbits along the way. An entry in one of Swift's account books, for instance, shows that he paid a shilling and 4 pence to see "dwarfs" in London (inspiration for the Lilliputians in Gulliver's Travels?); the OED cites Swift as the source for the first published use of the word "modernism"; a stuffed carcass of an executed prisoner was displayed in the library of Trinity College in Swift's hometown of Dublin (perhaps the source of one memorable passage in A Tale of a Tub); and Swift possessed both a hypersensitive sense of smell and the rare (at the time) ability to swim. On weightier matters, Damrosch offers some of the clearest political background I've encountered, including brief histories of the Whig and Tory parties and Swift's toggled relationship with them as he strove always for the via media (or middle way) in an age prone to extremes.

Damrosch puts finally to rest recurring accusations against Swift of misogyny, a slander that has lingered since his own day, mainly because of his harshly anti-romantic poetry. The fact is that Swift held remarkably progressive attitudes toward women—both in the universal and the particular—which Damrosch details amply. Swift had strong, lifelong bonds with several women (including, possibly, a secret marriage), and he stubbornly insisted that women were capable of and obliged to meet the same robust standards of intellect and character generally expected of men. Damrosch is quite correct in portraying Swift's views as prefiguring those of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

Seldom—if ever—has anyone who loved the church so fiercely exposed its follies and excesses as relentlessly as Swift did.

Damrosch's chapter "Swift and God" is particularly noteworthy. Swift's conservative, orthodox brand of Christianity, out of fashion even in his own lifetime, fueled his dogged insistence on correcting human pride and pretension, corrections no more popular then than they would be now. Damrosch's own heritage as the son and grandson of Episcopalian priests is evident in the understanding—rare in Swift biographies—he brings to Swift's unconventional but deeply committed Christian faith. Despite a lifetime of service to the Church of England, Swift was routinely suspected of irreverence, irreligion, and unbelief, in large part because of what Damrosch characterizes as his avoidance of "any conventional display of piety." (The bawd and bite of his satire surely accounts for much of the misguided skepticism about the sincerity of his faith.) Damrosch shows, however, that those closest to Swift "never doubted" the authenticity of his Christian belief. One clergyman resided in Swift's household for some months before realizing that the servants assembled quietly with Swift each evening for prayers. Swift said grace at each meal, fervently, with clasped hands "lifted up to his breast." Damrosch notes, too, a poignant fact recorded by a servant but overlooked by previous biographers: in later years when Swift's mind was lost to dementia, he continued his personal devotions "till at last he could only repeat the Lord's Prayer."

Nevertheless, Swift possessed, Damrosch writes, the "temptation to skepticism." In addressing Swift's statements about his doubts, Damrosch seems more uncomfortable with doubt than Swift, who proclaimed, "I am not answerable to God for the doubts that arise in my own breast, since they are the consequence of that reason which he hath planted in me." Damrosch characterizes Swift's relationship with God as "distant and impersonal," citing his animosity toward "enthusiasm," which Samuel Johnson defined in his 1755 Dictionary of the English Language as "vain belief of private revelation," a definition with which Swift would have heartily agreed. Damrosch's modern (and false) dichotomy of the faith experience as necessarily being either "enthusiastic" or "distant and impersonal" is perhaps the only quibble I have with an otherwise outstanding work of biographical, historical, and literary analysis.

Seldom—if ever—has anyone who loved the church so fiercely exposed its follies and excesses as relentlessly as Swift did. Those who love the church and seek to correct and improve it—or who love humanity and seek the same—could do no better than to study this master of language and wit. Damrosch's introductions and brief analyses of many of Swift's works will be helpful to readers who are exploring this often disorienting terrain for the first time.

For the more seasoned student of Swift, Cambridge University Press's scholarly edition of Gulliver's Travels is a treasure. Edited by David Womersley, professor of English literature at Oxford University, this weighty (in both senses of the word) edition was issued in 2012 as volume 16 in what will be a 17-volume set when the series is completed. At 806 pages, this is the most thoroughly annotated edition yet of Swift's most famous and engaging work. The lengthy introduction would itself be worthwhile reading even for a beginning student. Copious footnotes, essay-length endnotes, illustrations, appendices, an index, and a select bibliography make this volume a veritable encyclopedia of Swift scholarship, one I will surely rely on the next time I teach a course in Swift. In light of these two exciting new books, I can hardly wait—mostly because of the vexing sense that I myself am ever in need of Swift's correctives, ad infinitum.

Karen Swallow Prior is professor of English at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. She is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (T.S. Poetry Press, 2012) and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (Thomas Nelson, 2014).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In fiction, the One-Hit Wonder is that rare beast. Writers who pen an enduring debut novel but never a follow-up can generally be slotted into one of two categories: those for whom fiction was always intended as a side-project to other genres of writing, and those whose death cancelled out further literary forays. Titles belonging to that first camp would include The Picture of Dorian Gray and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things—the former a book met with outrage on publication, the latter feted by the 1997 Booker Prize panel. In the second camp are found the likes of Wuthering Heights and The Bell Jar, with tuberculosis and suicide prematurely halting the proceedings of two 30-year-old poet-novelists.

A third subset exists but it is rarer still and hazier to define: that belonging not to writers who turned their back on their craft after being disenchanted with poor sales or critical opprobrium but to those who became uncomfortable with fanatical adulation. It is tempting to call this the Margaret Mitchell category and to see it as the equivalent of an exclusive mausoleum that enshrines one author and one hallowed work. However, two points challenge this. First, despite refusing to write a sequel to Gone with the Wind, Mitchell died at 48 after being hit by a car, leaving readers to wonder if a prolonged life might have resulted in a change of heart. Second, after reading Marja Mills's memoir of her time spent with Harper Lee, The Mockingbird Next Door, we finally discover that one of several reasons why the reclusive author never wrote another novel was the unease that phenomenal success brought. How to live up to such impossible expectations? Mitchell belongs else-where. Lee belongs here.

Mills's book attempts to peel away those layers of mystique that surround Lee. She begins with the basics. To Kill a Mockingbird was published in 1960, won its 34-year-old author a Pulitzer in 1961, and spawned a 1962 Oscar-winning movie. The story of small-town childhood and racial injustice in Depression-era Alabama has since gone on to touch generations of readers. The book has sold 40 million copies and been translated into three dozen languages. It is required reading for 70 percent of American high school students. When in a 1991 survey the Library of Congress asked readers which book had most influenced their lives, only the Bible outranked Lee's novel.

Yet for all its success—or, as it transpires, because of it—Lee never published again. Not only did she retire from writing, she retreated from the public eye, and has for decades resisted giving interviews or making public appearances. Reporters who have made the pilgrimage to Lee's hometown of Monroeville (Maycomb in the novel) have left empty-handed.

Mills explains how in 2001, as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, she was tasked with making the same trip, tracking down Lee and securing an interview. It makes for a delicious premise. Up for the challenge, she arrives in Monroeville and conducts her research by speaking to the natives and joining the Mockingbird tourist trail for "a glimpse of the real world that inspired the fictional one." Eventually, unlike the masses that went before her, Mills pulls off a journalistic coup by getting first Lee's sister Alice to open doors for her and then Lee herself. A conversation begins and then, surprisingly, a friendship.

Drawing on productive hours in their company fueled by seemingly endless cups of coffee, Mills fleshes out both Lee sisters. Alice is 89 and still practicing law ("Atticus in a skirt," Lee calls her). Nelle Harper Lee ("call me Nelle—for goodness' sake") is 15 years younger. The sisters pool their memories and trade stories about their childhood in the 1930s. Both women are avid readers with keen minds who devour books on British history and that of the South, and have subscriptions to American and British periodicals. Mills is given reading lists to acquaint herself with the region—fiction by Faulkner and Welty and nonfiction about Alabama—and is taken on excursions to visit heritage sites and beauty spots. "With the Lees as my teachers," Mills gushes, "I learned more about literature, family, history, faith, friendship, and fun than I did in my entire schooling."

After Mills's article appears (B+, says Lee—"pleased, perhaps relieved"), she keeps in contact with the Lees, flitting regularly between Chicago and Monroeville. Then in 2004, Mills packs up, returns to the South, and moves in next door to the sisters. For 18 months she enjoys a more leisurely pace of life hanging out with a "gray-haired crew," fishing, talking, eating, all the while continuing to be "taught by a couple of Southern women who opened up their lives—and now their neighborhood—to this Yankee newcomer."

Mills throws more light on Lee in this second half of her book. We hear of Lee's trips from Monroeville to her second home in Manhattan; there is commentary on the friendship she forged with Gregory Peck ("Isn't he delicious?") and his wife, Veronique; and, best of all, valuable insight on Lee's old neighbor and childhood friend Truman Capote, including her disgust at his erratic behavior ("She fled the spotlight; he courted it") and a rumor-quashing categorical denial that he had any hand in the writing of Mockingbird.

So who is the Harper Lee that emerges from these pages? As early as page 2 we are told Alice "was the sweet one"; Lee, in contrast, "was the saltier one." (Later, the sisters' onetime pastor distinguishes them by saying "Nelle Harper has more hell and pepper in her.") Lee comes across as "a woman of formidable intellect," eager to broaden her knowledge and reluctant to suffer fools. When Mills misrepresents Southern pronunciation in her article Lee swiftly corrects her: "I had to admire her admonishment. It was succinct and delivered its sting with a dash of wit." She is prim in her manners and sensibility, increasingly frustrated with "a country and a culture grown coarse and obscene." Although appreciating the Harry Potter books, she admits to ignoring contemporary fiction. Technology seems to have passed her by: only later in life and after much coaxing did she buy a cellphone and TV. Fax is her preferred means of communication. She addresses Mills as "Hon" or "Child" and exhibits surprise with quiet bursts of "Mercy" or "Oh, Lord." And in a part of the country where "Football was second only to God in inspiring devotion," we learn that Lee is a "rabid Mets fan" with strong ties to the Methodist Church and a love of "good, old-fashioned preaching."

There is pleasure to be had in picturing Lee in several incongruous scenarios: chatting away at the Laundromat or McDonald's; watching evening movies or the Crimson Tide; stretching and straightening at Peggy Vale's exercise class. Pleasure gives way to sympathy when Mills delineates the "swirl of apprehension, resentment and irritation" that plagues Lee in the run-up to an annual Mockingbird luncheon in Tuscaloosa.

Mills has enjoyed unprecedented access to Lee, and we should be grateful for the tidbits she throws our way. However, The Mockingbird Next Door is by no means a warts-and-all memoir. Lee is the least talkative person in the book and is conspicuously paraphrased while those around her are quoted verbatim. Several gray areas, such as Lee's sexuality and possible alcohol problems, are aired and mulled over with friend Tom, but such questions are finally left unanswered. Mills raises other topics directly with Lee and receives curt replies ("That's for me to know and you to find out"). On some occasions Lee doesn't respond at all. Mills defends her friend's guardedness and her book's lacunae—"To her credit, much of what she wanted off the record was to spare the feelings of a relative or a friend"—but the circ*mspection frustrates. Worse, what we get as an alternative is flimsy padding that could have been omitted: Lee's routine trips to feed and count the ducks; the revelation that Alice's nickname, "Bear," derives from seeing bears in the zoo as a little girl.

At times Mills writes with a palpable glee in response to her good fortune. She recalls standing with Lee in a strip mall parking lot and says "there was no place I'd rather have been at that moment." Six pages later, recalling time spent with Alice, she comes to the same conclusion: "There was no place I'd rather be." We end up feeling torn between criticizing her for such cloying overpraise and chiding ourselves for grudging her that exuberance.

Whatever little she came away with, and however she presents it, Mills's book can still be regarded a scoop. It is worth reading for her scattered nuggets of value and swathes of local color, and it brings us nearer to Lee than Charles J. Shields's unauthorized 2006 biography, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. If Mills's portrait is too lightly adumbrated, short on detail and lacking definition, it could nonetheless be the closest we ever get.

Malcolm Forbes' reviews and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The National, The Australian, The Daily Beast, the Quarterly Conversation, and many other journals.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.