"Finding your Religion: When the Faith You Grew Up with Has Lost It's Meaning," by Scotty McLennan

Excerpt from Garry Trudeau's Introduction:

    "As the chaplain at Tufts University for fifteen years, Scotty has ministered to a generation of students and faculty, many of them discouraged by failures of faith similar to his own. Some of them were rebelling against the suffocating embrace of family traditions, some had had their beliefs shaken by their study of modernists and skeptics like Freud, and some had been overtaken by the pervasive secular humanism of their times. Yet all felt empty and hungry and ready to approach the mountain once again. Their stories of re-engagement and renewal are what gives this book such power, especially when viewed as stages of faith-building. Take a step forward, the author exhorts. Now take another. Don't worry about the auspices -- the mountain is criss-crossed with an infinite variety of paths, some more traveled than others. But all of them lead to glory.

    I grew up in the Episcopalian faith -- the 'best religion money can buy,' it was joked -- and my family worshiped at the small, wooden, rural church my great-grandfather had helped found. A block down the street was a far more imposing structure, the town's Catholic church, and to me, it was terra incognita. Since the church was dark and vaulted and built of stone, and since it was always leaking incense and Latin into the street outside, Catholicism remained shrouded in otherness the whole of my childhood. My faith home was St. Luke's-- home in the same way that the Yankees, not the Dodgers, and Ike, not Adlai, were home. In a small town, no one takes you by the hand and says 'You may not be from our tribe, but here you are welcome. Here you are free to seek grace--or not.'

    When the faith of one's youth loses its meaning, there is no ingrained cultural habit of looking elsewhere. Indeed, in much of the world, where religious freedom is all but unknown, the strictures against straying make it unthinkable. But in millennial America, there are, to paraphrase Paul Tillich, many windows through which to see God at work. This book frees you to gaze through all of them, to drink in the light until you find the clarity that gives life meaning."