The Formerly Evangelical Intelligentsia

Paul Harvey

Kiera Feldman, "New York Literati on Growing Up Evangelical," from Killing the Buddha, explores the early evangelical influences of writers James Wood ( critics for New Republic), Malcolm Gladwell (New Yorker staff writer known for Blink and other books), and Christine Smallwood (of The Nation). All three live and write on the grounds of what Wood called "disappointed belief," and a search for a substitute for the transcendent:

What remains in the absence of faith is the very question of secular life: how are we to feel deeply without access to the divine in everyday experience, warming our hearts with a love that is not of this world? And how are we to think?

Recommended piece.