Although she was only thirty-seven when she died, the Christian thinker Rachel Held Evans was a beloved figure in the landscape of American religion. The author of several popular books on Christianity, she employed self-deprecating wit and practical exegesis to critique the conservative evangelical subculture in which she was raised. Held Evans embodied a movement that emerged in the two-thousands among people who were becoming disillusioned with evangelicalism. Many were fleeing their churches . . . and, to outsiders, their departure looked like the secularization of America. But the demographic was more varied than it seemed; many evangelicals were leaving megachurches with praise bands and coffee bars, but not abandoning a belief in Jesus.
With humility and openness, Held Evans helped reintroduce a mode of spiritual inquiry in America that was based in seeking mystery, not certainty. After she died, she left behind 11,762 words of an unfinished manuscript, which has become part of a new memoir, “Wholehearted Faith,” that posthumously continues her exploration of divine love and doubt.
—Eliza Griswold, from “The Afterlife of Rachel Held Evans”
Read more of the story, plus Eliza Griswold’s other writing on religion, including how to talk about climate change across the political divide and the unmaking of Biblical womanhood.
Simone Weil, A Kindred Spirit
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