It may have been the “San Francisco,” I realized later, but the city's name was a reasonable stand-in, by that point, for everything conservative Christians had come to hate about the Episcopal Church as a whole: homosexuality wealth feminism and morally relativist, decadent, rudderless liberalism. “Saint Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, in San Francisco,” I said, as her face rearranged itself, froze, and closed. I showed her the little volume of psalms that I'd borrowed from Rick Fabian. I smiled back, and we exchanged small talk about the weather and flight delays, and then she asked me what I was reading.

She had short blond hair and a cross of her own, and was wearing some kind of sexless denim jumper that reeked of piety. A woman-perhaps noticing the silver crucifix I had recently and self-consciously started to wear around my neck-caught my eye and smiled as she took the stool next to me. Gregory's, I found myself at a restaurant counter in the Denver airport, waiting for a flight home from a reporting trip.

Just a few months after I began going to St. But if I had imagined that, initiated as a Christian, I was going to achieve some kind of easy bond with other believers, that fantasy was soon shot. (Feb.“Before I knew anything about church, I'd assumed that most Christians spoke the same language, shared a sense of fellowship, and beyond minor differences had a faith in common that could transcend political boundaries.

It was a mystery that I was finally willing to swallow.' Grittier than many religious memoirs, Miles's story is a perceptive account of one woman's wholehearted, activist faith. Not willing to turn anyone away, she raised funds and helped set up other food pantries in impoverished areas, occasionally 'crossing the line from self-righteous do-gooder to crusading zealot.' For Miles, Christianity 'wasn't an argument I could win, or even resolve. What her parish needed, she decided, was a food pantry-and within a year (and over opposition from some fellow parishioners) she had started one that offered free cereal, fruit and vegetables to hundreds of San Francisco's indigent every Friday. Converted at age 46 when she impulsively walked into a church and received communion for the first time, the former war correspondent suddenly understood her life's mission: to feed the hungry. Where is it written that literary women must move to coastal California (if they don't already live there), become Episcopalians and write conversion memoirs? Miles, like recent memoirists Diana Butler Bass, Nora Gallagher and Lindsey Crittenden, loves Jesus and detests the religious right, though she is also critical of 'the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity.' Mild-mannered she is not.

Take this bread a radical conversion