• Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2021 February #1
  *Starred Review* The riveting story of a twentieth-century martyr, Bonhoeffer (2010), captured the imagination of millions, including President Obama. Here the author of that chronicle recounts how he rediscovered his Christian faith. Metaxas acknowledges religious influences already shaping him during his childhood and adolescence—the Nicene Creed he uncomprehendingly memorized in his immigrant father's Greek, the "Jesus Movement" Catholic priest he joined as a teen for good-vibe prayers, the modern-vernacular New Testament he found in his parents' bedroom and read with nascent belief. But these early spiritual influences proved too weak to sustain Metaxas against the sophisticated skepticism that surrounded him as a student of literature at Yale, where he cut ties with Christian friends, who became an embarrassment among his hip nihilist classmates. Yet Metaxas still hungered for what au courant friends and professors dismissed as illusion: real meaning. Metaxas' candor allows readers to see how that hunger persists after graduation, even as financial distress reduces a once-ambitious writer to proofreading chemical manuals. In a narrative improbable yet compelling, readers see an Episcopalian graphic designer nudging this confused proofreader toward spiritual openness, so priming him for a life-changing dream infused with ancient symbolism, the sign of a spiritual rebirth as a Christian. A profoundly moving memoir. Copyright 2021 Booklist Reviews.

ERIC METAXAS is an author whose books have been translated into twenty-five languages. The host of a nationally syndicated radio show and the acclaimed conversation series Socrates in the City, he is a prominent cultural commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Wall Street Journal. He lives with his family in New York City.