Revelation
A Search for Faith in a Violent Religious World
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Acclaimed journalist Dennis Covington examines how faith and violence shape our world.
In war zones witnessing widespread conflict, what makes life at all worth living? When chaos becomes a way of life in places where religion and violence intersect, what do people hold on to? If religious belief is, as Christopher Hitchens argues, the cause of wars and genocide, then is faith the cure?
Dennis Covington pursued answers to these questions for years, traveling deep into places like Syria, Mexico, and the American South. Looking not for rigid doctrines, creeds, or beliefs -- which, he says, can be contradictory, even dangerous -- he sought something bigger and more fundamental: faith. It's faith in goodness, kindness, and the humanity of the smallest moments that makes the most difficult times bearable.
The young bomb victim who offers a smile from his hospital bed, the grieving parent who shares a photograph, the joined hands of men who were previously mortal enemies, and Covington's own family turmoil. These are some of the moments that leave him touching the beating heart of what it truly is to live.
Like Covington's widely celebrated Salvation on Sand Mountain, Revelation is an intensely personal journey that goes to the edges of a world filled with violence and religious strife to find the enduring worth of living.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deftly interweaving personal tragedy with reporting forays into brutal conflicts, Covington (Salvation on Sand Mountain) delivers a superb, fast-paced memoir. During his own spiritual crisis, Covington determines to discover "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In pursuit of answers about his own faith, Covington first travels to Juarez, Mexico, where he interviews a street preacher who takes in mental patients amid drug-cartel violence as well as the city's citizens who bury the horrendous number of murder victims. Eventually, he heads to the Middle East in search of Kayla Mueller, a 25-year-old Baptist aid worker from Arizona who was kidnapped by ISIS in Syria. Swiftly sketched scenes of illegally crossing the Turkey-Syria border take readers into war-ravaged hospitals and refugee camps. Traumatically, Covington suffers a head injury from a vacuum bomb that leaves him with lasting brain injuries. He visits Mueller's parents to decipher how their understanding of God has changed as a result of their daughter's abduction by terrorists with whom their government will not negotiate. Reflecting the bleakness of the conflict in the Levant, Covington never finds Mueller, but headlines record her disturbing fate. What Covington discovers about Mueller's final weeks, when faced with seemingly impossible circumstances, rekindles a long-lost spark in his dark night. Covington's memoir is an essential, human account of the violent reactions to religious plurality in an increasingly polarized world.
