Review

Elaine Pagels is a Princeton Professor and the author of eight previous books on religion, including New York Times bestseller The Gnostic Gospels, which explore the history and bases of the Bible and current Christian beliefs. Her impressive scholarship has earned her Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Fellowships. This book, which took her seven years to write, is different. It is a personal story, part memoir, part grief book, part summary of some of her previous findings. Professor Pagels, the daughter of Stanford University academics, grew up in the "giant marshmallow" of Palo Alto. She escaped by skipping school to go to concerts with classmate Jerry Garcia and briefly become a follower of Billy Graham. After college, she went to New York to study modern dance with Martha Graham, decided she wasn't good enough to pursue it as a career, and applied to five different graduate schools in five different disciplines. She was accepted at all but Harvard's religion department, so she waited a year, reapplied, and was accepted. Soon, she was working on "top secret" Egyptian heretical gospels discovered in 1945, which became the basis of her scholarly work. Pagels married brilliant physicist Heinz Pagels. Their son Mark was born with a serious lung ailment and died when he was six. Pagels felt overwhelming grief and, initially, guilt. "Wasn't protecting Mark's life our primary responsibility? Since we couldn't save his life, hadn't we failed as parents?" One year later, Heinz Pagels died in a hiking accident, leaving Elaine with two recently-adopted toddlers. Her first reaction was anger. How could he leave me in this situation? Why did he even THINK about hiking (where he had safely walked many times before)? During this nightmare, Pagels was forced to examine her beliefs and, doing so, summarizes some of the contents of her previous books including guilt, punishment, and the devil construct. She found that dogma did nothing but increase the feelings of guilt. "I had to divest myself of the illusion that we deserved what had happened; believing it would have crushed us." Along the way, Pagels mentions uncanny coincidences which provide a spiritual dimension to her inquiry. Does she answer the question "Why Religion?" In a way, yes. Her story is very interesting and well told. It should provide comfort to those who have suffered a devastating loss and support for those who value religious community.

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