I think I am on to a new personal favorite genre of spiritual literature: memoirs that tell the story of a person’s unlikely spiritual transformation in an environment very much unfamiliar and even inimical to the one in which he/she was raised. The market is flooded with conversion stories to Christ, but ones that tell the story in a grateful and truly humble way are few and far between. Eager new converts too often come across to their audience as, “I’ve got it, whatever ‘it’ is, and you need it, whoever ‘you’ are.” With hardly a note of personal connection, their plea for salvation falls flat as nothing more than a hawking of cheap furniture.

Two books that have come out in the last few years buck this trend, the first one by a man who remained a more informed non-believer and the second by a lesbian English professor whose transformation led her to become the wife of a Reformed Presbyterian pastor. Continue reading →