Essay on faith a new endeavour for novelist

By Kurt Armstrong and ChristianWeek | March 2, 2010

For those of you who read these reviews (the editor, mom, dad) it might be helpful for me to admit my bias toward mainstream, non-evangelical books. I'm always interested in knowing what people outside the evangelical subculture think. What issues are they wrestling with? How do they make sense of the world and their place in it? What do they think about God, faith and the Church?

David Adams Richards is hardly someone from outside the Church; he's been a faithful Roman Catholic his whole life. But his novels are not overtly Christian stories, and they're certainly not evangelical, which makes his new book, God Is, a major departure.

The book is an essay about finding faith in a secular age. "I decided to write this book," he says, "because over the last number of years I realized I did not agree so much with the faithful so much as disagree with the faithful."

He begins with a discussion of one of the twentieth century's great atheists, Josef Stalin, who Richards says is a terrifying reminder to today's atheists that religious people aren't the only ones who do bad things. But then he places us all on the same continuum of wrongdoing, describing sin as a con we willingly go along with. Richards knows we're not all murderers like Stalin, but he won't let us plead our innocence. Murder, he says, is "the sin that all other sins aspire to." He critiques the mentality of "the mob," whether in the macho posturing of the barroom or the literary establishment, where talk of "sin" and "God" are outside of convention.

Faith in God will save us, he says, and all of us count on God in some way, whether we worship Him or curse Him. Faith doesn't stop murder from happening to everyone, but it saves me from being a murderer.

Heavy stuff. But this book is much more than a polemic or a philosophical argument. There are some philosophical strands in it, but more than anything it's a homily and a personal testimony. Adams digs deep into his personal history of alcoholism, violence, doubt and disillusion as well as his encounters with the miraculous and transcendent, and he locates himself in the great cosmic struggle between sin and salvation.

I read this book carefully and slowly, partly because before Richards is a Christian apologist, he is a beautifully gifted writer. But I read slowly too, because when someone talks about something this personal I want to do him the honour of listening very carefully to what he has to say.