Wideman's Gospel

Více o knize

The coming-of-age story about Calvin Wideman, an ex-evangelical who left the church gradually and then, in college, became a disciple of Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Timothy Leary. Recruited to mediate a seemingly unbridgeable divide between true believers in his family, Cal gets drawn into their erudite “biblical bickering” despite his best intentions. The family feud over the true meaning of scriptures central to Christian faith compels him to reexamine experiences and relationships that have left him, as a newly minted Bachelor of Arts, with nagging regrets and a lack of direction and purpose.The story opens the weekend before Christmas, 1974. Flying back to Chicago, Cal feels homesick for the country he just left. After graduating from Northwestern, he spent his savings wandering in Mexico. His best friend Josh meets him at O'Hare, apparently to gloat that Cal will finally have to deal with so-called “real life.” Josh urges him to phone his mom who has been pestering with calls about some mysterious “urgent family matter.”Cal’s parents inform him that his younger sister Rachel has joined a cult. He suspects they’re overreacting. He agrees to act as their emissary and the next day visits Rachel at the alleged commune in an ultra-rich suburb. He receives a polite welcome and learns more than he ever wanted to about the group’s radical reinterpretation of the Greek New Testament. On Christmas Eve, Cal finds himself playing devil’s advocate to defend Rachel’s new beliefs to the family. His parents’ militant opposition mystifies him because it blatantly contradicts precepts that are fundamental to their Reformed theology. The drama that ensues forces Cal to relive the trauma of losing his religion and, at the same time, to navigate the inevitable tensions between faith and reason, freedom and family, memory and imagination—in the world as we find it and the world as we want it to be.