Monthly Archives: April 2010

This absorbing collection of nine short stories has two common themes: Texas as a homeland and Christianity as a balm and a barb. Some of the characters in the first four stories grew up with Jesus and never leave Him, however they may struggle at times with the organized church.

The narrator son in the Houston family of the second part’s five stories (which comprise a novella) encounters Jesus late, after his blind and depressed mother has driven his scientist father into the bed of her longtime caretaker. In his remorse, as his marriage is collapsing, the father seeks counseling and becomes Born Again.

Thus he becomes what many devout believers are in America today, and particularly the evangelical Christians of the stories in the book’s first part: outsiders in a secular society which either mocks the expression of their values, attacks them as subversive, or ignores them altogether. Author David McGlynn comes at it all as a skilled reporter, neither endorsing nor condemning, but finely detailing the challenges and the rewards of a way of life that increasingly is being lost to us.