A hunger for faith.

• Author: Haslanger, Phil
• Position: Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion - Book review

Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion

by Sara Miles

Ballantine Books. 283 pages. $24.95.

By Phil Haslanger

Sara Miles was a pretty unlikely candidate to convert to Christianity. She was raised in Greenwich Village by confirmed atheists who gave her "boundless love, liberal politics, and secular morals." She worked as a no-nonsense cook in restaurants in New York and as a radical journalist and organizer in Central America during the wars of the 1980s. She is a lesbian, mother of a child born outside of marriage, someone who deeply distrusted dogma of any kind.

And Christians weren't exactly part of her social network. "In America, I knew exactly one person who was Christian," she writes in her new book, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion . "My friends, at most, read about Buddhism or practiced yoga." So, as she puts it, "I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian. Or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut."

If this book were simply a conversion story, it could easily get shelved along with lots of other sweet stories of people finding God and changing their lives. Miles, though, has written far more than that. She has chronicled her own struggles in what she calls "an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion." Along the way, she offers biting insights into the role of religion in American society, gives an inside look at the way this country provides--or doesn't provide--for its poorest citizens, and delves honestly into the contradictions of organized religion, even within politically progressive congregations.

Her story holds particular interest for me. True, our backgrounds are very different: I was raised in a religious household, have been active in church all my life, am a heterosexual, married father of four grown children, with a longtime career in local journalism. But the last few years have been a period of transformation for me, as well. I now straddle the skeptical world of journalism at a hell-raising progressive newspaper in Madison, Wisconsin (The Capital Times , a longtime cousin of this magazine) and the faith-imbued world of religion, where I work half time as a pastor at a congregation of the United Church of Christ (which is at the liberal end of American denominations). I share a passion with Miles for the centrality within the Christian experience of taking bread and sharing it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

My spiritual journey has been more evolutionary and less abrupt...