This Book somehow escaped my radar until recently. I’m glad I ran across it!

Here is a vulnerable, frank story of a journey to Christian faith and back out – by a kind of professional seldom heard from as to their faith journey – a reporter.

I must add that author, William Lobdell, was not merely a “beat” reporter, but at times also a newspaper editor. He did some complex and deep investigative Reporting. If one lived in the Los Angeles area during his era with Los Angeles Times affiliated papers, and followed issues and stories on religion, one would know his name. (I did not, having lived there before his time. I knew of or was involved with some of the churches and organizations important in his personal life and reporting, however. So the book was extra meaningful to me in that regard, but it is far from merely regional in the significance of his reporting and, of course, his own journey.)

Lobdell plunged into the kind of “life of faith” I had been raised within from birth and endeavored to live from my teen years to my mid-forties. His “born again” experience came at age 28. He studied voraciously about his new faith, eagerly participating, even as he advanced rapidly in his main interest area in reporting – religion.

An interesting side issue in the book is Lobdell’s success in transforming, for at least a while and particularly in the vast Los Angeles area, the way religion is covered and dealt with in newspapers. (I happen to feel as he did, that the issues, events and people in religion, are generally not given the attention or quality of reporting and analysis they deserve… I say as a fairly faithful church-goer more concerned with the community, ethical and spiritual/emotional aspects of religion than the “worship”, dogma or institutions.)

Though the book is about 14 years in circulation, its issues are fully contemporary – both the kinds of scandals and tragedies Lobdell unearthed and the wrestling with issues of faith and affiliation with others, whatever the church. It reads very similarly to many of the posts one can see continually online, within a number of Facebook groups, personal blogs, etc.: how to reconcile the many contradictions between ideals and stated beliefs and actual behavior by “believers” as just one aspect; whether the theological tenets make coherent sense in any kind of logic, for another.

In the case of the author’s career in newspaper investigative reporting, much of this was in the very early days of the breaking-open of the severe, saddening numerous cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests and their cover-up by church officials in location after location. Lobdell, after conversion and deep immersion in an Evangelical Protestant setting, had studied and worshipped with Catholics a good period and very nearly took membership there.

The drama of that situation, in the midst of his heart-rending discoveries, alone is worth the reading of this well-written, deeply thoughtful book. (Protestant scandals were among the things he also investigated and reported on, lest he, or my review, appears to be picking on Catholics to the exclusion of other denominations.)

If a potential reader has been sexually abused or experienced trauma in a church setting, I do advise caution in reading this book. If you are emotionally stable and open about critiques of what you may believe religiously, or are otherwise interested to hear some of the darker “inside stories” of religion and its American institutions, steel yourself and jump into this book!