Saints and Sinners
Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggart, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell , Matthew Fox
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower comes a fascinating book about religion in America, about the passions, triumphs, and failures of the life of faith, revealing stories of grace and despair, sexual scandal and attempted murder. • "Insightful...vivid...beautifully rendered stories." —Chicago Tribune
Lawrence Wright's Saints and Sinners are Jimmy Swaggart, who preached a hellfire gospel with rock 'n' roll abandon before he was caught with a, prostitute in a seedy motel; Anton LaVey, the kitsch-loving, gleefully fraudulent founder of the First Church of Satan; Madalyn Murray O'Hair, whose litigious atheism sometimes resembled a brand of faith; Matthew Fox, the Dominican priest who has aroused the fury of the Vatican for dismissing the doctrine of original sin and denouncing the church as a dysfunctional family; Walker Railey, the rising star of Dallas's Methodist church, who, at the pinnacle of his success, was suspected of attempting to murder his wife; and Will Campbell, the eccentric liberal Southern Baptist preacher whose challenges to established ways of thinking have made him a legend in his own time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wright ( In the New World ) explains that his own spiritual uncertainty impelled him to interview these six religious figures. The first two essays are compelling accounts of two of them who went astray: Walker Railey, a prominent Methodist minister in Dallas who in 1987 was charged with attempting to kill his wife, then committed suicide, leaving a note about the ``demon in his soul''; and Jimmy Swaggart, the evangelist disgraced by his escapades with prostitutes. But the piece on Madalyn Murray O'Hair, an atheist activist in Texas, combines hearsay with vague allegations of financial misdoings. Others covered are Anton LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966; Will Campbell, who studied theology at Yale and whose Southern ministry includes the Ku Klux Klan; and Matthew Fox, a New Age Catholic priest in Oakland, Calif. The essays, although clever and incisive, are diminished by the author's ruminations on his own spiritual quest, which seems an artificial device.
