Richard Rodriguez

An award-winning writer delivers a major reckoning with religion, place, and sexuality in the aftermath of 9/11Hailed in The Washington Post as "one of the most eloquent and probing public intellectuals in America, " Richard Rodriguez now considers religious violence worldwide, growing public atheism in the West, and his own mortality. Rodriguez's stylish new memoir-the first book in a decade from the Pulitzer Prize finalist-moves from Jerusalem to Silicon Valley, from Moses to Liberace, from Lance Armstrong to Mother Teresa.
Rodriguez is a homosexual who writes with love of the religions of the desert that exclude him. He is a passionate, unorthodox Christian who is always mindful of his relationship to Judaism and Islam because of a shared belief in the God who revealed himself within an ecology of emptiness. And at the center of this book is a consideration of women-their importance to Rodriguez's spiritual formation and their centrality to the future of the desert religions.
Only a mind as elastic and refined as Rodriguez's could bind these threads together into this wonderfully complex tapestry.