cover image Holy Roller: A White Reporter Enters the World of Black Pentecostal Spirituality

Holy Roller: A White Reporter Enters the World of Black Pentecostal Spirituality

Julie Lyons, . . WaterBrook, $18.99 (244pp) ISBN 978-1-4000-7495-2

The former editor for the alternative weekly Dallas Observer , Lyons writes about her membership of nearly two decades in a poor South Dallas African-American Pentecostal church, the Body of Christ Assembly. Though she found the church as a reporter in search of a story about supernatural healing from crack cocaine addiction, she arrived a fully formed believer in search of her own healing from her attraction to women and her depression. The book tracks the lives of the founding pastor, Fredrick Eddington Sr., a onetime drug addict with schizophrenic tendencies who overcame his problems through faith, and his wife and co-pastor, Diane, a legally blind, captious woman for whom life is a tightrope between holiness and hell. Lyons writes searing and sympathetic portraits of the down-and-out black residents of South Dallas. But this slim memoir is short on historical, political and economic analysis and long on descriptions of moral sins, from the sexual to the selfish. The book's overwhelming emphasis on “deliverance” often runs up against the realities of poverty and exploitation. Lyons briefly acknowledges this during a church mission trip to Botswana, but never fully examines it. Readers looking for an intimate peek at black Pentecostal religiosity, in its successes and shortcomings, will appreciate the book. (June 16)