The Captive Reader

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Marg from The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.

Marg has the Mr Linky this week!

Just one book for me this week: Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt by Richard Holloway.  I am fascinated by memoirs that focus on the writer’s faith, perhaps because religion has never been part of my life or the lives of those around me so everything in these books is completely foreign to me and all the more captivating because of that.

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.

What did you pick up this week?