Saints & sinners

In his new book, Saints & Sinners, Lawrence Wright takes us into the lives of six contemporary religious leaders through extensive interviews with them, with their adherents, and with their critics. A skeptical journalist seeking in part to learn something about his own beliefs, Wright sets out to explore the ways in which the struggle with faith has shaped each of these men and women. The six are:. Walker Railey, the ambitious rising star of Dallas's downtown Methodist church (which Wright attended as a child), who - at the pinnacle of his success, admired by his influential parishioners, and already spoken of as a potential bishop - was suspected of attempting to murder his wife. Jimmy Swaggart, the evangelist, whose various demons - perhaps with him since the childhood he shared with his two cousins, rock-and-roll singer Jerry Lee Lewis and Texas nightclub owner Mickey Gilley - finally brought him to the notorious motel bedroom on Louisiana's Airline Highway and the scandal that destroyed the world's most flourishing television ministry. Madalyn Murray O'Hair, whose battle with God inspired a lifelong effort to legitimize atheism in America, and led as well to the 1964 Supreme Court decision that ended prayer in our public schools. Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, masterful dramatizer of his anti-faith, who now calls up spirits - in his notorious black house where secret rituals were once performed in a hidden chamber behind a fake fireplace - by playing kitsch music on one of his eight synthesizers. Will Campbell, the eccentric liberal Southern Baptist preacher, whose challenges to established ways of thinking (in the late sixties he shocked both the left and the right by expanding his civil rights ministry to include the Ku Klux Klan) and stubborn refusal to come up with easy answers have made him a legend in his own time. Matthew Fox, a Dominican, constantly at war with a Vatican that is trying to defrock him, who incorporates elements of New Age and revolutionary thinking into his priesthood, and is willing to explore unorthodox paths to spiritual awakening. Bringing us close to these six, letting us listen to their voices and see them in all their complexities, Lawrence Wright has written a richly fascinating book about the tasks, passions, triumphs, and failures of the life of faith.