Book description
The acclaimed writer, respected thinker and outspoken former bishop
Richard Holloway recounts a life defined by the biggest questions: Who
am I? And what is God? At fourteen, Richard Holloway left his home in
the Vale of Leven, north of Glasgow, and travelled hundreds of miles to
be educated and trained for the priesthood by a religious order in an
English monastery. By twenty-five he had been ordained and was working
in the slums of Glasgow. Throughout the following forty years, Richard
touched the lives of many people in the Church and in the wider
community. But behind his confident public face lay a restless, unquiet
heart and a constantly searching mind. Why is the Church, which claims
to be the instrument of God's love, so prone to cruelty and
condemnation? And how can a man live with the tension between public
faith and private doubt? In his long-awaited memoir, Richard seeks to
answer these questions and to explain how, after many crises of faith,
he finally and painfully left the Church. It is a wise, poetic and
fiercely honest book. A wonderfully honest and deeply moving
reflection on the nature of doubt, saintly almost in its modesty -
though Holloway might not like my saying so. A breath of fresh doubt
that so many of us need, whether believer or nonbeliever, and I'm both.
